5 papers
Learning Scientific Exploration from Human Research Decision Trajectories
Xuchen Gong, Shane Gu, Haokun Liu +3
A key challenge in building AI systems for scientific research is enabling : the systematic process of investigating unknown phenomena or ideas to…
Principled Top- Selection for Language Models with Hybrid Gradients
Xuchen Gong, Junfei Sun, Tian Li
Selecting the best items out of candidates is a critical component of modern large language model systems, such as document selection in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG…
Asynchronous Heavy-Tailed Optimization
Junfei Sun, Dixi Yao, Xuchen Gong +3
Heavy-tailed stochastic gradient noise, commonly observed in transformer models, can destabilize the optimization process. Recent works mainly focus on developing and understanding…
Private Zeroth-Order Optimization with Public Data
Xuchen Gong, Tian Li
One of the major bottlenecks for deploying popular first-order differentially private (DP) machine learning algorithms (e.g., DP-SGD) lies in their high computation and memory cost…
Zeroth-Order Sharpness-Aware Learning with Exponential Tilting
Xuchen Gong, Tian Li
Classic zeroth-order optimization approaches typically optimize for a smoothed version of the original function, i.e., the expected objective under randomly perturbed model paramet…