6 citations · 17 across the 24 of their papers we have counts for
13 papers · 1 filter
When Errors Can Be Beneficial: A Categorization of Imperfect Rewards for Policy Gradient
Shuning Shang, Hubert Strauss, Stanley Wei +2
Training language models via reinforcement learning often relies on imperfect proxy rewards, since ground truth rewards that precisely define the intended behavior are rarely avail…
Escaping the Cognitive Well: Efficient Competition Math with Off-the-Shelf Models
Xingyu Dang, Rohit Agarwal, Rodrigo Porto +3
In the past year, custom and unreleased math reasoning models reached gold medal performance on the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO). Similar performance was then reported…
How Does RL Post-training Induce Skill Composition? A Case Study on Countdown
Simon Park, Simran Kaur, Sanjeev Arora
While reinforcement learning (RL) successfully enhances reasoning in large language models, its role in fostering compositional generalization (the ability to synthesize novel skil…
On the Impossibility of Retrain Equivalence in Machine Unlearning
Jiatong Yu, Yinghui He, Anirudh Goyal +1
Machine unlearning seeks to selectively remove the "influence" of specific training data on a model's outputs. The ideal goal is Retrain Equivalence--behavior identical to a model…
Rethinking Thinking Tokens: LLMs as Improvement Operators
Lovish Madaan, Aniket Didolkar, Suchin Gururangan +6
Reasoning training incentivizes LLMs to produce long chains of thought (long CoT), which among other things, allows them to explore solution strategies with self-checking. This res…
Metacognitive Reuse: Turning Recurring LLM Reasoning Into Concise Behaviors
Aniket Didolkar, Nicolas Ballas, Sanjeev Arora +1
Large language models (LLMs) now solve multi-step problems by emitting extended chains of thought. During the process, they often re-derive the same intermediate steps across probl…
Weak-to-Strong Generalization Even in Random Feature Networks, Provably
Marko Medvedev, Kaifeng Lyu, Dingli Yu +3
Weak-to-Strong Generalization (Burns et al., 2024) is the phenomenon whereby a strong student, say GPT-4, learns a task from a weak teacher, say GPT-2, and ends up significantly ou…
On the Power of Context-Enhanced Learning in LLMs
Xingyu Zhu, Abhishek Panigrahi, Sanjeev Arora
We formalize a new concept for LLMs, context-enhanced learning. It involves standard gradient-based learning on text except that the context is enhanced with additional data on whi…
Unrealized Expectations: Comparing AI Methods vs Classical Algorithms for Maximum Independent Set
Yikai Wu, Haoyu Zhao, Sanjeev Arora
AI methods, such as generative models and reinforcement learning, have recently been applied to combinatorial optimization (CO) problems, especially NP-hard ones. This paper compar…
Instruct-SkillMix: A Powerful Pipeline for LLM Instruction Tuning
Simran Kaur, Simon Park, Anirudh Goyal +1
We introduce Instruct-SkillMix, an automated approach for creating diverse, high quality SFT data for instruction-following. The pipeline involves two stages, each leveraging an ex…
Keeping LLMs Aligned After Fine-tuning: The Crucial Role of Prompt Templates
Kaifeng Lyu, Haoyu Zhao, Xinran Gu +3
Public LLMs such as the Llama 2-Chat underwent alignment training and were considered safe. Recently Qi et al. [2024] reported that even benign fine-tuning on seemingly safe datase…
Unlearning via Sparse Representations
Vedant Shah, Frederik Träuble, Ashish Malik +5
Machine \emph{unlearning}, which involves erasing knowledge about a \emph{forget set} from a trained model, can prove to be costly and infeasible by existing techniques. We propose…
A Quadratic Synchronization Rule for Distributed Deep Learning
Xinran Gu, Kaifeng Lyu, Sanjeev Arora +2
In distributed deep learning with data parallelism, synchronizing gradients at each training step can cause a huge communication overhead, especially when many nodes work together…