Language creates a compact representation of the world and allows the description of unlimited situations and objectives through compositionality. While these characterizations may foster instructing, conditioning or structuring interactive agent behavior, it remains an open-problem to correctly relate language underst…
This paper proposes a new method to connect language and physical actions in reinforcement learning.
problem Connecting linguistic representations to the physical world in embodied agents.
method Language-conditioned goal generators to decouple sensorimotor learning from language acquisition.
result Agents can demonstrate a diversity of behaviors for any given instruction.
WebGUM learns web navigation from multimodal data, outperforming previous methods.
problem Limited generalization from domain-specific models in web navigation.
method Instruction-following multimodal agent trained on vision-language foundation models.
result Significant improvement in web navigation performance on benchmarks.
In this paper, we present a technique that improves the process of training an agent (using RL) for instruction following. We develop a training curriculum that uses a nominal number of expert demonstrations and trains the agent in a manner that draws parallels from one of the ways in which humans learn to perform comp…
Qwen3-8B outperforms classical models in financial text classification.
problem Financial text classification for trading systems and sentiment analysis.
method Noisy Embedding Instruction Finetuning and Rank-stabilized Low-Rank Adaptation.
result Qwen3-8B achieves better classification accuracy and fewer training epochs.
To be successful in real-world tasks, Reinforcement Learning (RL) needs to exploit the compositional, relational, and hierarchical structure of the world, and learn to transfer it to the task at hand. Recent advances in representation learning for language make it possible to build models that acquire world knowledge f…
Study shows model size inversely affects few-shot instruction accuracy.
problem Understanding how model size impacts few-shot instruction prompting accuracy.
method Introduced DeltaWords dataset to evaluate model's ability to follow instructions.
result Model size inversely affects few-shot instruction accuracy, with larger models performing worse.
While traditional methods for instruction-following typically assume prior linguistic and perceptual knowledge, many recent works in reinforcement learning (RL) have proposed learning policies end-to-end, typically by training neural networks to map joint representations of observations and instructions directly to act…
Reinforcement learning is a promising framework for solving control problems, but its use in practical situations is hampered by the fact that reward functions are often difficult to engineer. Specifying goals and tasks for autonomous machines, such as robots, is a significant challenge: conventionally, reward function…
New methods predict language model out-of-distribution behaviors using causal mechanisms.
problem Predicting how language models behave on unseen data.
method Two methods: counterfactual simulation and value probing.
result Both methods achieve high AUC-ROC and outperform causal-agnostic approaches in out-of-distribution settings.
Study shows training duration impacts model merging quality, suggesting joint selection of duration and method.
problem Impact of expert training duration on model merging quality for large language models (LLMs).
method Systematically fine-tuned experts on five domains across three model sizes, evaluating five merging methods at each duration.
result Training duration affects merging quality, with simple averaging degrading sharply and sparsification-based methods performing well past the validation optimum.
Study shows training duration affects model merging quality, suggesting joint selection of duration and method.
problem Impact of expert training duration on model merging quality for large language models (LLMs).
method Systematically fine-tuned experts on five domains across three model sizes, evaluated five merging methods at each duration.
result Training duration and merging method should be chosen jointly, not independently.
LEWIS merges LLMs without training, improving performance on specific tasks.
problem Limited performance improvement of merged models on specific benchmarks.
method Guided model merging using layer-wise sparsity and task-vector pruning.
result Improved model performance by up to 11.3% on math-solving tasks.
TRIPLE efficiently optimizes prompts with a budget constraint.
problem Efficiently selecting good prompts from a pool of candidates.
method TRIPLE connects prompt optimization to best arm identification in MAB, leveraging BAI-FB tools.
result TRIPLE outperforms baselines on multiple tasks with limited budget constraints.
Survey of alignment techniques for large language models.
problem Ensuring large language models align with human values.
method Analysis of diverse alignment methods and training paradigms.
result Preference-based methods offer more flexibility for nuanced alignment.
The study uncovers latent capabilities of language models via causal representation learning.
problem Rigorous causal evaluations of language model capabilities are challenging due to confounding effects and computational costs.
method Proposes a causal representation learning framework to identify latent capability factors as causally interrelated after controlling for a common confounder (base model).
result Identifies a three-node linear causal structure explaining performance variations across 1500 models and six benchmarks.
Trading-R1 uses LLMs for financial trading, improving risk-adjusted returns.
problem Lack of interpretability and trust in AI for finance.
method Supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning with a curriculum.
result Improved risk-adjusted returns and lower drawdowns compared to other models.
Solving complex, temporally-extended tasks is a long-standing problem in reinforcement learning (RL). We hypothesize that one critical element of solving such problems is the notion of compositionality. With the ability to learn concepts and sub-skills that can be composed to solve longer tasks, i.e. hierarchical RL, w…
Sloth predicts LLM performance using latent skills across families.
problem Variations in benchmark performance due to differences in training configurations and data processing across model families.
method Sloth uses publicly available benchmark data and assumes LLM performance is driven by latent skills influenced by model size and training tokens. It exploits correlations across benchmarks to provide accurate predictions.
result Sloth predicts LLM performance accurately and offers insights into scaling behaviors for complex tasks.
New method prevents forgetting in LLMs by dynamically identifying task-specific subspaces.
problem Catastrophic forgetting in continual learning of LLMs.
method Adaptive Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) for constrained full fine-tuning.
result Achieves state-of-the-art results in continual learning benchmarks.
FSPO optimizes synthetic preferences for LLM personalization.
problem Personalizing large language models for diverse users.
method FSPO reframes reward modeling as a meta-learning problem, using few labeled preferences and synthetic data.
result FSPO achieves high winrates in personalized responses, both synthetic and real.
LLM Pro Finance Suite enhances financial NLP with instruction-tuned models.
problem Limited NLP capabilities for financial tasks in generalist models.
method Instruction-tuned large language models fine-tuned on financial data.
result Consistent improvement over state-of-the-art baselines in finance tasks.
The study examines label smoothing to improve confidence calibration in fine-tuned LLMs.
problem Improving confidence calibration in fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) after instruction tuning.
method Examine various open-sourced LLMs, label smoothing, and custom kernel design.
result Label smoothing is effective in maintaining confidence calibration but faces challenges in large vocabulary LLMs.
New method optimizes language model performance for test-time strategies.
problem Mismatch between training objectives and test-time deployment of large language models.
method Tail-Extrapolated estimators to approximate best-of-N performance from limited training rollouts.
result Improved performance of best-of-N deployment across various models and datasets.
Learning in environments with large state and action spaces, and sparse rewards, can hinder a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent's learning through trial-and-error. For instance, following natural language instructions on the Web (such as booking a flight ticket) leads to RL settings where input vocabulary and number of…
Adaptive Nucleus Truncation Improves Long-Form Reasoning
problem Improving long-form reasoning in language models
method Adaptive Nucleus Truncation Sampling (ANTS)
result Significant performance gains across various benchmarks
New method adapts neural networks without losing prior knowledge.
problem Understanding and enabling flexible adaptation of neural networks.
method Differential geometry framework, functionally invariant paths (FIP).
result Achieves comparable state-of-the-art performance on continual learning and sparsification tasks.
Deleting refusal directions from models leads to systematically more optimistic decisions.
problem The impact of removing refusal directions from models on decision-making outcomes.
method Ablation study using a frozen pipeline of 21,600 weekly equity decisions.
result Ablation of refusal directions makes models more optimistic and justifies themselves more, but also reduces confidence.