24 accepted papers
Normative theories allow one to elicit key parts of a ML algorithm from first principles, which is crucial at a time of championed scrutiny for ML work. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) cleverly bypasses reward modeling by making an explicit link with a specific normative model of human choice. …
Despite the growing reasoning capabilities of recent large language models (LLMs), their internal mechanisms during the reasoning process remain underexplored. Prior approaches often rely on human-defined concepts (e.g., overthinking, reflection) at the word level to analyze reasoning in a supervise…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are susceptible to security and safety threats, such as prompt injection, prompt extraction, and harmful requests. One major cause of these vulnerabilities is the lack of an instruction hierarchy. Modern LLM architectures treat all inputs equally, failing to distinguish…
The machine learning community is increasingly recognizing the importance of fostering trust and safety in modern generative AI (GenAI) models. We posit machine unlearning (MU) as a crucial foundation for developing safe, secure, and trustworthy GenAI models. Traditional MU methods often rely on str…
The cosine router in Mixture of Experts (MoE) has recently emerged as an attractive alternative to the conventional linear router. Indeed, the cosine router demonstrates favorable performance in image and language tasks and exhibits better ability to mitigate the representation collapse issue, which…
Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has been pivotal in enabling Large Language Models (LLMs) to effectively follow instructions and produce meaningful alignment by leveraging human preference data. Traditionally, RLHF involves generating responses to a query and using a separate rewar…
Recent works have demonstrated success in controlling sentence attributes (e.g., sentiment) and structure (e.g., syntactic structure) based on the diffusion language model. A key component that drives theimpressive performance for generating high-quality samples from noise is iteratively denoise for…
Slicing distribution selection has been used as an effective technique to improve the performance of parameter estimators based on minimizing sliced Wasserstein distance in applications. Previous works either utilize expensive optimization to select the slicing distribution or use slicing distributi…
Auto-regressive generation models achieve competitive performance across many different NLP tasks such as summarization, question answering, and classifications. However, they are also known for being slow in inference, which makes them challenging to deploy in real-time applications. We propose a s…
Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a promising solution to align large language models (LLMs) more closely with human values. Off-policy preference optimization, where the preference data is obtained from other models, is widely adopted due to its cost efficiency and scalability. H…
When learning task-oriented dialogue (ToD) agents, reinforcement learning (RL) techniques can naturally be utilized to train dialogue strategies to achieve user-specific goals. Prior works mainly focus on adopting advanced RL techniques to train the ToD agents, while the design of the reward functio…
Generative modeling with ordinary differential equations (ODEs) has achieved fantastic results on a variety of applications. Yet, few works have focused on controlling the generated content of a pre-trained ODE-based generative model. In this paper, we propose to optimize the output of ODE models ac…
Through prompting, large-scale pre-trained models have become more expressive and powerful, gaining significant attention in recent years. Though these big models have zero-shot capabilities, in general, labeled data are still required to adapt them to downstream tasks. To overcome this critical lim…
Aligning language models (LMs) with preferences is an important problem in natural language generation. A key challenge is that preferences are typically provided at the *sequence level* while LM training and generation both occur at the *token level*. There is, therefore, a *granularity mismatch* b…
In offline model-based reinforcement learning (offline MBRL), we learn a dynamic model from historically collected data, and subsequently utilize the learned model and fixed datasets for policy learning, without further interacting with the environment. Offline MBRL algorithms can improve the effici…
Active learning, which effectively collects informative unlabeled data for annotation, reduces the demand for labeled data. In this work, we propose to retrieve unlabeled samples with a local sensitivity and hardness-aware acquisition function. The proposed method generates data copies through local…
Retriever-reader models achieve competitive performance across many different NLP tasks such as open question answering and dialogue conversations. In this work, we notice these models easily overfit the top-rank retrieval passages and standard training fails to reason over the entire retrieval pass…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) extends the paradigm of classical RL algorithms to purely learning from static datasets, without interacting with the underlying environment during the learning process. A key challenge of offline RL is the instability of policy training, caused by the mismatch be…
Existing methods for unsupervised domain adaptation often rely on minimizing some statistical distance between the source and target samples in the latent space. To avoid the sampling variability, class imbalance, and data-privacy concerns that often plague these methods, we instead provide a memory…
The neural attention mechanism has been incorporated into deep neural networks to achieve state-of-the-art performance in various domains. Most such models use multi-head self-attention which is appealing for the ability to attend to information from different perspectives. This paper introduces ali…
Attention-based neural networks have achieved state-of-the-art results on a wide range of tasks. Most such models use deterministic attention while stochastic attention is less explored due to the optimization difficulties or complicated model design. This paper introduces Bayesian attention belief…
Dropout has been demonstrated as a simple and effective module to not only regularize the training process of deep neural networks, but also provide the uncertainty estimation for prediction. However, the quality of uncertainty estimation is highly dependent on the dropout probabilities. Most curren…
Training NLP systems typically assumes access to annotated data that has a single human label per example. Given imperfect labeling from annotators and inherent ambiguity of language, we hypothesize that single label is not sufficient to learn the spectrum of language interpretation. We explore new…
Attention modules, as simple and effective tools, have not only enabled deep neural networks to achieve state-of-the-art results in many domains, but also enhanced their interpretability. Most current models use deterministic attention modules due to their simplicity and ease of optimization. Stocha…