Ruoxing Yang

Ruoxing Yang

We introduce PPOPT - Proximal Policy Optimization using Pretraining, a novel, model-free deep-reinforcement-learning algorithm that leverages pretraining to achieve high training efficiency and stability on very small training samples in physics-based environments. Reinforcement learning agents typically rely on large samples of environment interactions to learn a policy. However, frequent interactions with a (computer-simulated) environment may incur high computational costs, especially when the environment is complex. Our main innovation is a new policy neural network architecture that consists of a pretrained neural network middle section sandwiched between two fully-connected networks. Pretraining part of the network on a different environment with similar physics will help the agent learn the target environment with high efficiency because it will leverage a general understanding of the transferrable physics characteristics from the pretraining environment. We demonstrate that PPOPT outperforms baseline classic PPO on small training samples both in terms of rewards gained and general training stability. While PPOPT underperforms against classic model-based methods such as DYNA DDPG, the model-free nature of PPOPT allows it to train in significantly less time than its model-based counterparts. Finally, we present our implementation of PPOPT as open-source software, available at github.com/Davidrxyang/PPOPT.

Ruoxing Yang

Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT have evolved into powerful and ubiquitous tools. Fine-tuning on small datasets allows LLMs to acquire specialized skills for specific tasks efficiently. Although LLMs provide great utility in both general and task-specific use cases, they are limited by two security-related concerns. First, traditional LLM hardware requirements make them infeasible to run locally on consumer-grade devices. A remote network connection with the LLM provider's server is usually required, making the system vulnerable to network attacks. Second, fine-tuning an LLM for a sensitive task may involve sensitive data. Non-private fine-tuning algorithms produce models vulnerable to training data reproduction attacks. Our work addresses these security concerns by enhancing differentially private optimization algorithms and applying them to fine-tune localizable language models. We introduce adaptable gradient clipping along with other engineering enhancements to the standard DP-Adam optimizer to create DP-Adam-AC. We use our optimizer to fine-tune examples of two localizable LLM designs, small language model (Qwen2.5-0.5B) and 1.58 bit quantization (Bitnet-b1.58-2B). We demonstrate promising improvements in loss through experimentation with two synthetic datasets.