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Collaborating Authors

 Shen, Jingyan


Conformal Tail Risk Control for Large Language Model Alignment

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Recent developments in large language models (LLMs) have led to their widespread usage for various tasks. The prevalence of LLMs in society implores the assurance on the reliability of their performance. In particular, risk-sensitive applications demand meticulous attention to unexpectedly poor outcomes, i.e., tail events, for instance, toxic answers, humiliating language, and offensive outputs. Due to the costly nature of acquiring human annotations, general-purpose scoring models have been created to automate the process of quantifying these tail events. This phenomenon introduces potential human-machine misalignment between the respective scoring mechanisms. In this work, we present a lightweight calibration framework for blackbox models that ensures the alignment of humans and machines with provable guarantees. Our framework provides a rigorous approach to controlling any distortion risk measure that is characterized by a weighted average of quantiles of the loss incurred by the LLM with high confidence. The theoretical foundation of our method relies on the connection between conformal risk control and a traditional family of statistics, i.e., L-statistics. To demonstrate the utility of our framework, we conduct comprehensive experiments that address the issue of human-machine misalignment.


Rethinking Diverse Human Preference Learning through Principal Component Analysis

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Understanding human preferences is crucial for improving foundation models and building personalized AI systems. However, preferences are inherently diverse and complex, making it difficult for traditional reward models to capture their full range. While fine-grained preference data can help, collecting it is expensive and hard to scale. In this paper, we introduce Decomposed Reward Models (DRMs), a novel approach that extracts diverse human preferences from binary comparisons without requiring fine-grained annotations. Our key insight is to represent human preferences as vectors and analyze them using Principal Component Analysis (PCA). By constructing a dataset of embedding differences between preferred and rejected responses, DRMs identify orthogonal basis vectors that capture distinct aspects of preference. These decomposed rewards can be flexibly combined to align with different user needs, offering an interpretable and scalable alternative to traditional reward models. We demonstrate that DRMs effectively extract meaningful preference dimensions (e.g., helpfulness, safety, humor) and adapt to new users without additional training. Our results highlight DRMs as a powerful framework for personalized and interpretable LLM alignment.


MMA-RNN: A Multi-level Multi-task Attention-based Recurrent Neural Network for Discrimination and Localization of Atrial Fibrillation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The automatic detection of atrial fibrillation based on electrocardiograph (ECG) signals has received wide attention both clinically and practically. It is challenging to process ECG signals with cyclical pattern, varying length and unstable quality due to noise and distortion. Besides, there has been insufficient research on separating persistent atrial fibrillation from paroxysmal atrial fibrillation, and little discussion on locating the onsets and end points of AF episodes. It is even more arduous to perform well on these two distinct but interrelated tasks, while avoiding the mistakes inherent from stage-by-stage approaches. This paper proposes the Multi-level Multi-task Attention-based Recurrent Neural Network for three-class discrimination on patients and localization of the exact timing of AF episodes. Our model captures three-level sequential features based on a hierarchical architecture utilizing Bidirectional Long and Short-Term Memory Network (Bi-LSTM) and attention layers, and accomplishes the two tasks simultaneously with a multi-head classifier. The model is designed as an end-to-end framework to enhance information interaction and reduce error accumulation. Finally, we conduct experiments on CPSC 2021 dataset and the result demonstrates the superior performance of our method, indicating the potential application of MMA-RNN to wearable mobile devices for routine AF monitoring and early diagnosis.