arXiv AI

Fine-Tune, Then Rectify

The paper proposes a two‑stage framework that first fine‑tunes a large language model (LLM) and then rectifies its outputs, allocating limited labeled data optimally between the stages. It argues that the usual mean‑squared‑error objective for fine‑tuning misaligns with the downstream rectification, and instead suggests minimizing prediction‑error variance for mean estimation or a scalarized variance metric for general M‑estimation. Empirical results confirm that this variance‑based fine‑tuning, combined with optimal data allocation, yields significant efficiency gains over using either fine‑tuning or rectification alone, or using the conventional objective.

arXiv AI
Sep 2

Efficiently Estimating Optimal Hyperparameter Scaling Laws through Power-Law Entropy Search

The paper introduces Power‑Law Entropy Search (PLES), a computational‑cost‑aware acquisition function that uses multi‑fidelity Bayesian optimization to efficiently estimate optimal hyperparameter scaling laws for large language model training. PLES focuses on reducing the overall uncertainty of scaling law estimates rather than optimizing a single objective, selecting configurations that maximize uncertainty reduction per unit computational cost. Experiments on synthetic benchmarks, surrogate models, and real LLM pre‑training runs show that PLES converges to accurate scaling laws using less than one‑tenth of the computational budget required by conventional grid search and other baselines.

By Zhiliang Chen, Sebastian Ament, David Eriksson, Maximilian Balandat, Eytan Bakshy, Jihao Andreas Lin
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Prediction-Powered Smoothing and Validation for Disaggregated AI Evaluation

The paper introduces prediction‑powered smoothing (PP‑S) and its taxonomy‑aware extension (PP‑TS) to improve point and interval estimates of domain‑specific AI performance when only a limited sample of labeled units is available. It also proposes a new design‑based cross‑validation score that is approximately unbiased for selecting between direct and smoothed estimators. Experiments on a curated benchmark and real‑world agent traffic show that the proposed methods outperform direct estimators in both accuracy and coverage, and that the new score matches the performance of an independent validation sample while providing more precise error estimates.

By Sho Kawano, Zehang Richard Li, Paul A. Parker
arXiv AI
2d ago

OTROPE: Optimal Transport-based Robust Off-policy Evaluation for Large Language Models

The paper introduces OTROPE, a likelihood‑free method for off‑policy evaluation of large language models (LLMs) that uses optimal transport to align labeled samples from a behavior model with unlabeled samples from a target model in a semantic space. OTROPE corrects human‑labeled residuals with proxy predictors, achieving a doubly robust evaluation without requiring behavior‑policy modeling or density‑ratio estimation. The authors provide theoretical guarantees for consistency and convergence, and demonstrate through synthetic and real LLM tasks that OTROPE outperforms existing baselines and can elevate weaker evaluators to match or exceed stronger ones.

By Liner Xiang, Wenbo Zhang, Hengrui Cai