Yonghao Zhu | Searcharxiv

arXiv2025

Origin of Suppressed Ferroelectricity in k-Ga$_2$O$_3$: Interplay Between Polarization and Lattice Domain Walls

The large discrepancy between experimental and theoretical remanent polarization and coercive field limits the applications of wide-band-gap ferroelectric materials. Here, using a machine-learning potential trained on ab-initio molecular dynamics data, we identify a new mechanism of the interplay between polarization domain wall (PDW) and lattice domain wall (LDW) in ferroelectric k-phase gallium oxide (Ga2O3), which reconciles predictions with experimental observations. Our results reveal that the reversal of out-of-plane polarization is achieved through in-plane sliding and shear of the Ga-O sublayers. This pathway creates strong anisotropy in PDW propagation, and crucially leads to topologically forbidden PDW propagation across the 120 degree LDWs observed in synthesized samples. The resulting stable network of residual domain walls bypasses slow nucleation and suppresses the observable polarization and coercive field. These insights highlight the potential for tailoring the ferroelectric response in k-Ga2O3 from lattice-domain engineering.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2024

Parameter Efficient Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

While Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) effectively aligns pretrained Large Language and Vision-Language Models (LLMs, and VLMs) with human preferences, its computational cost and complexity hamper its wider adoption. To alleviate some of the computational burden of fine-tuning, parameter efficient methods, like LoRA were introduced. In this work, we empirically evaluate the setup of Parameter Efficient Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (PE-RLHF) that leverages LoRA fine-tuning for Reward Modeling, and Reinforcement Learning. We benchmark the PE-RLHF setup on six diverse datasets spanning summarization, harmless/helpful response generation, UI automation, and visual question answering in terms of effectiveness of the trained models, and the training resources required. Our findings show, for the first time, that PE-RLHF achieves comparable performance to RLHF, while significantly reducing training time (up to 90% faster for reward models, and 30% faster for RL), and memory footprint (up to 50% reduction for reward models, and 27% for RL). We provide comprehensive ablations across LoRA ranks, and model sizes for both reward modeling and reinforcement learning. By mitigating the computational burden associated with RLHF, we push for a broader adoption of PE-RLHF as an alignment technique for LLMs and VLMs.

cs.LG↗