arXiv Machine Learning
ExpBoN: Exponential-Noise Best-of-$n$ for Efficient Test-Time LLM Alignment
Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Machine Learning.
Related stories
arXiv AI
Sep 2
Bandits in Prod: Hyperparameter Optimization at Inference Time
The paper introduces Online Hyperparameter Optimization (OHPO), framing it as an infinitely many‑armed bandit problem over mixed and conditional search spaces. It proposes the IMABO framework, which couples any bandit policy with any oracle for proposing new configurations, and presents IMOSS—a restart‑free anytime policy with provable regret bounds. Experiments show that IMABO, combined with practical oracles such as TPE, an incumbent‑mutation oracle, and a pretrained tabular foundation model, outperforms random search across a range of settings from classical ML models to LLM‑based agents.
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 18
Towards a theory of inference-time alignment with unknown rewards
arXiv:2608. 15402v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative model alignment has received broad interest, and significant progress has been made in supervised fine-tuning and inference-time computation.
arXiv AI
Jul 7
Safe Inference-Time Alignment via Lagrangian Reward Augmentation
arXiv:2607. 02781v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inference-time alignment steers a frozen language model during decoding using auxiliary reward signals, avoiding the cost of repeated weight updates.
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 14
Rank-Conditioned Sample Reuse for the Plackett--Luce Best-of-$K$ Objective
arXiv:2607. 11146v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the coupled objective J_K^WOR = E_{S ~ PL-WOR_K}[max_{i in S} R_i]: the expected maximum reward of a size-K Plackett-Luce draw without replacement, the law of Gumbel-Top-K / Stochastic Beam Search decoding.
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22
Swiss-Knife: A Framework for Reconfigurable Externalised Multi-Objective Alignment at Decode Time
Swiss-Knife is a framework that extends decode‑time alignment for frozen language models by treating the alignment specification as a runtime object. It introduces hot‑swappable scoring blades, a batch normaliser, a pairwise aggregation operator, and a selection rule, and characterises admissible aggregation operators with a representation theorem. In experiments, Swiss‑Knife paired with DPO‑LoRA blades and an uncertainty‑aware pairwise tournament outperforms six existing decode‑time methods, achieving a higher harmonic F1 score, lower refusal rate, and faster objective reconfiguration.
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 10
Gradient-Guided Reward Optimization for Inference-time Alignment
arXiv:2606. 09635v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Ensuring the reliability of Large Language Models (LLMs) under distribution drift requires inference-time adaptation.