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Related papers: Reward Collapse in Aligning Large Language Models

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Text-to-image models are powerful for producing high-quality images based on given text prompts, but crafting these prompts often requires specialized vocabulary. To address this, existing methods train rewriting models with supervision…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Hongji Yang , Yucheng Zhou , Wencheng Han , Jianbing Shen

Reward design in reinforcement learning (RL) is challenging since specifying human notions of desired behavior may be difficult via reward functions or require many expert demonstrations. Can we instead cheaply design rewards using a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-02 Minae Kwon , Sang Michael Xie , Kalesha Bullard , Dorsa Sadigh

Reward-based alignment methods for large language models (LLMs) face two key limitations: vulnerability to reward hacking, where models exploit flaws in the reward signal; and reliance on brittle, labor-intensive prompt engineering when…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Zae Myung Kim , Chanwoo Park , Vipul Raheja , Suin Kim , Dongyeop Kang

The performance of pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) is often sensitive to nuances in prompt templates, requiring careful prompt engineering, adding costs in terms of computing and human effort. In this study, we present experiments…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Liang Cheng , Tianyi LI , Zhaowei Wang , Mark Steedman

Reward models are central to aligning large language models, yet they often overfit to spurious cues such as response length and overly agreeable tone. Most prior work weakens these cues directly by penalizing or controlling specific…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Yunsheng Lu , Zijiang Yang , Licheng Pan , Zhixuan Chu

The alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) is critically dependent on reward models trained on costly human preference data. While recent work explores bypassing this cost with AI feedback, these methods often lack a rigorous theoretical…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Yi-Chen Li , Tian Xu , Yang Yu , Xuqin Zhang , Xiong-Hui Chen , Zhongxiang Ling , Ningjing Chao , Lei Yuan , Zhi-Hua Zhou

The latest generation of LLMs can be prompted to achieve impressive zero-shot or few-shot performance in many NLP tasks. However, since performance is highly sensitive to the choice of prompts, considerable effort has been devoted to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-06 Alina Leidinger , Robert van Rooij , Ekaterina Shutova

Recently, large language models (LLMs) (e.g., GPT-4) have demonstrated impressive general-purpose task-solving abilities, including the potential to approach recommendation tasks. Along this line of research, this work aims to investigate…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-01-25 Yupeng Hou , Junjie Zhang , Zihan Lin , Hongyu Lu , Ruobing Xie , Julian McAuley , Wayne Xin Zhao

Prompting has shown impressive success in enabling large pretrained language models (LMs) to perform diverse NLP tasks, especially when only few downstream data are available. Automatically finding the optimal prompt for each task, however,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Mingkai Deng , Jianyu Wang , Cheng-Ping Hsieh , Yihan Wang , Han Guo , Tianmin Shu , Meng Song , Eric P. Xing , Zhiting Hu

Large Language Models (LLMs) can be tasked with scoring texts according to pre-defined criteria and on a defined scale, but there is no recognised optimal prompting strategy for this. This article focuses on the task of LLMs scoring journal…

Digital Libraries · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Mike Thelwall

Large language models (LLMs) can be used as accessible and intelligent chatbots by constructing natural language queries and directly inputting the prompt into the large language model. However, different prompt' constructions often lead to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-14 Jinta Weng , Jiarui Zhang , Yue Hu , Daidong Fa , Xiaofeng Xuand , Heyan Huang

Recent self-rewarding large language models (LLM) have successfully applied LLM-as-a-Judge to iteratively improve the alignment performance without the need of human annotations for preference data. These methods commonly utilize the same…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Zhaoyang Wang , Weilei He , Zhiyuan Liang , Xuchao Zhang , Chetan Bansal , Ying Wei , Weitong Zhang , Huaxiu Yao

Preference alignment in Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly improved their ability to adhere to human instructions and intentions. However, existing direct alignment algorithms primarily focus on relative preferences and often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Shenao Zhang , Zhihan Liu , Boyi Liu , Yufeng Zhang , Yingxiang Yang , Yongfei Liu , Liyu Chen , Tao Sun , Zhaoran Wang

A common approach for aligning language models to human preferences is to first learn a reward model from preference data, and then use this reward model to update the language model. We study two closely related problems that arise in this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-22 Zihao Wang , Chirag Nagpal , Jonathan Berant , Jacob Eisenstein , Alex D'Amour , Sanmi Koyejo , Victor Veitch

Reward modeling has emerged as a crucial component in aligning large language models with human values. Significant attention has focused on using reward models as a means for fine-tuning generative models. However, the reward models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Brian Christian , Hannah Rose Kirk , Jessica A. F. Thompson , Christopher Summerfield , Tsvetomira Dumbalska

We provide a systematic understanding of the impact of specific components and wordings used in prompts on the effectiveness of rankers based on zero-shot Large Language Models (LLMs). Several zero-shot ranking methods based on LLMs have…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-07-28 Shuoqi Sun , Shengyao Zhuang , Shuai Wang , Guido Zuccon

Previous work has shown that there exists a scaling law between the size of Language Models (LMs) and their zero-shot performance on different downstream NLP tasks. In this work, we show that this phenomenon does not hold when evaluating…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-09-27 Joel Jang , Seonghyeon Ye , Minjoon Seo

Prompt optimization improves the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) without requiring parameter updates to the target model. Following heuristic-based "Think step by step" approaches, the field has evolved in two main…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Andreea Nica , Ivan Zakazov , Nicolas Mario Baldwin , Saibo Geng , Robert West

Preference learning is critical for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values, with the quality of preference datasets playing a crucial role in this process. While existing metrics primarily assess data quality based on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Kexin Huang , Junkang Wu , Ziqian Chen , Xue Wang , Jinyang Gao , Bolin Ding , Jiancan Wu , Xiangnan He , Xiang Wang

Restless Multi-Armed Bandits (RMABs) have been successfully applied to resource allocation problems in a variety of settings, including public health. With the rapid development of powerful large language models (LLMs), they are…