17 accepted papers
When aligning large language models (LLMs), their performance across various tasks (such as being helpful, harmless, and honest) is heavily influenced by the composition of the training data. However, it is difficult to determine what mixture of data should be used to produce a model with strong per…
We study the post-training of large language models (LLMs) with human preference data. Recently, direct preference optimization and its variants have shown considerable promise in aligning language models, eliminating the need for reward models and online sampling. Despite these benefits, these meth…
The ability of large language models (LLMs) to execute complex instructions is essential for their real-world applications. However, several recent studies indicate that LLMs struggle with challenging instructions. In this paper, we propose Evolutionary Contrastive Distillation (ECD), a novel method…
Out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization is critical for machine learning models deployed in the real world. However, achieving this can be fundamentally challenging, as it requires the ability to learn invariant features across different domains or environments. In this paper, we propose a novel fr…
Active learning is a label-efficient approach to train highly effective models while interactively selecting only small subsets of unlabelled data for labelling and training. In “open world" settings, the classes of interest can make up a small fraction of the overall dataset – most of the data may…
The model selection problem in the pure exploration linear bandit setting is introduced and studied in both the fixed confidence and fixed budget settings. The model selection problem considers a nested sequence of hypothesis classes of increasing complexities. Our goal is to automatically adapt to…
Many active learning and search approaches are intractable for large-scale industrial settings with billions of unlabeled examples. Existing approaches search globally for the optimal examples to label, scaling linearly or even quadratically with the unlabeled data. In this paper, we improve the com…
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is important for machine learning models deployed in the wild. Recent methods use auxiliary outlier data to regularize the model for improved OOD detection. However, these approaches make a strong distributional assumption that the auxiliary outlier data is comple…
In this paper we propose a novel experimental design-based algorithm to minimize regret in online stochastic linear and combinatorial bandits. While existing literature tends to focus on optimism-based algorithms–which have been shown to be suboptimal in many cases–our approach carefully plans which…
In recent years methods from optimal linear experimental design have been leveraged to obtain state of the art results for linear bandits. A design returned from an objective such as G-optimal design is actually a probability distribution over a pool of potential measurement vectors. Consequently, o…
We consider active learning for binary classification in the agnostic pool-based setting. The vast majority of works in active learning in the agnostic setting are inspired by the CAL algorithm where each query is uniformly sampled from the disagreement region of the current version space. The sampl…
We consider interactive learning in the realizable setting and develop a general framework to handle problems ranging from best arm identification to active classification. We begin our investigation with the observation that agnostic algorithms \emph{cannot} be minimax-optimal in the realizable set…
This paper proposes near-optimal algorithms for the pure-exploration linear bandit problem in the fixed confidence and fixed budget settings. Leveraging ideas from the theory of suprema of empirical processes, we provide an algorithm whose sample complexity scales with the geometry of the instance a…
We consider two multi-armed bandit problems with $n$ arms: \emph{(i)} given an $\epsilon > 0$, identify an arm with mean that is within $\epsilon$ of the largest mean and \emph{(ii)} given a threshold $\mu_0$ and integer $k$, identify $k$ arms with means larger than $\mu_0$. Existing lower bounds an…
We propose a new variant of the top arm identification problem, \emph{top feasible arm identification}, where there are $K$ arms associated with $D$-dimensional distributions and the goal is to find $m$ arms that maximize some known linear function of their means subject to the constraint that their…
We introduce the feasible arm identification problem, a pure exploration multi-armed bandit problem where the agent is given a set of $D$-dimensional arms and a polyhedron $P = \{x : A x \leq b \} \subset R^D$. Pulling an arm gives a random vector and the goal is to determine, using a fixed budget o…
We consider the task of collaborative preference completion: given a pool of items, a pool of users and a partially observed item-user rating matrix, the goal is to recover the personalized ranking of each user over all of the items. Our approach is nonparametric: we assume that each item i and each…