English
Related papers

Related papers: RLCD: Reinforcement Learning from Contrastive Dist…

200 papers

Reinforcement learning (RL) has played an important role in improving the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs). Some studies apply RL directly to \textit{smaller} base models (known as zero-RL) and also achieve notable…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Xiao Hu , Xingyu Lu , Liyuan Mao , YiFan Zhang , Tianke Zhang , Bin Wen , Fan Yang , Tingting Gao , Guorui Zhou

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a predominant technique to align language models (LMs) with human preferences or promote outputs which are deemed to be desirable by a given reward function. Standard RL approaches optimize average…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Stephen Zhao , Aidan Li , Rob Brekelmans , Roger Grosse

Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) facilitates efficient inference by distilling multi-step diffusion models into few-step variants. Concurrently, Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a vital tool for aligning generative models…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Dengyang Jiang , Dongyang Liu , Zanyi Wang , Qilong Wu , Liuzhuozheng Li , Hengzhuang Li , Xin Jin , David Liu , Changsheng Lu , Zhen Li , Bo Zhang , Mengmeng Wang , Steven Hoi , Peng Gao , Harry Yang

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a popular paradigm for aligning models with human intent. Typically RLHF algorithms operate in two phases: first, use human preferences to learn a reward function and second,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-01 Joey Hejna , Rafael Rafailov , Harshit Sikchi , Chelsea Finn , Scott Niekum , W. Bradley Knox , Dorsa Sadigh

Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining has emerged as a prominent approach for training vision and text encoders with uncurated image-text pairs from the web. To enhance data-efficiency, recent efforts have introduced additional supervision…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-12-21 Bumsoo Kim , Yeonsik Jo , Jinhyung Kim , Seung Hwan Kim

Large-scale self-supervised pre-trained speech encoders outperform conventional approaches in speech recognition and translation tasks. Due to the high cost of developing these large models, building new encoders for new tasks and deploying…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-29 Heng-Jui Chang , Ning Dong , Ruslan Mavlyutov , Sravya Popuri , Yu-An Chung

Knowledge distillation aims to transfer representation ability from a teacher model to a student model. Previous approaches focus on either individual representation distillation or inter-sample similarity preservation. While we argue that…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-03-31 Jinguo Zhu , Shixiang Tang , Dapeng Chen , Shijie Yu , Yakun Liu , Aijun Yang , Mingzhe Rong , Xiaohua Wang

Reward models (RMs) play a pivotal role in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. Due to the difficulty of obtaining high-quality human preference annotations, distilling preferences from generative LLMs has emerged…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Hongli Zhou , Hui Huang , Wei Liu , Chenglong Wang , Xingyuan Bu , Lvyuan Han , Fuhai Song , Muyun Yang , Wenhao Jiang , Hailong Cao , Tiejun Zhao

Existed pre-trained models have achieved state-of-the-art performance on various text classification tasks. These models have proven to be useful in learning universal language representations. However, the semantic discrepancy between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-07 Jinhe Lan , Qingyuan Zhan , Chenhao Jiang , Kunping Yuan , Desheng Wang

The success of RL for LLM post-training stems from an unreasonably uninformative source: a single bit of information per rollout as binary reward or preference label. At the other extreme, distillation offers dense supervision but requires…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Yuda Song , Lili Chen , Fahim Tajwar , Remi Munos , Deepak Pathak , J. Andrew Bagnell , Aarti Singh , Andrea Zanette

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human expectations without human-annotated preference data is an important problem. In this paper, we propose a method to evaluate the response preference by using the output probabilities of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-16 Aiwei Liu , Haoping Bai , Zhiyun Lu , Xiang Kong , Simon Wang , Jiulong Shan , Meng Cao , Lijie Wen

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is the mainstream paradigm used to align large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. Yet existing RLHF heavily relies on accurate and informative reward models, which are vulnerable…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-15 Wei Shen , Xiaoying Zhang , Yuanshun Yao , Rui Zheng , Hongyi Guo , Yang Liu

Large language models (LLMs) aligned for safety often suffer from over-refusal, the tendency to reject seemingly toxic or benign prompts by misclassifying them as toxic. This behavior undermines models' helpfulness and restricts usability…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Yuxiao Lu , Lin Xu , Yang Sun , Wenjun Li , Jie Shi

Reward learning enables the application of reinforcement learning (RL) to tasks where reward is defined by human judgment, building a model of reward by asking humans questions. Most work on reward learning has used simulated environments,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-01-10 Daniel M. Ziegler , Nisan Stiennon , Jeffrey Wu , Tom B. Brown , Alec Radford , Dario Amodei , Paul Christiano , Geoffrey Irving

Large-scale contrastive learning models can learn very informative sentence embeddings, but are hard to serve online due to the huge model size. Therefore, they often play the role of "teacher", transferring abilities to small "student"…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-01-31 Chaochen Gao , Xing Wu , Peng Wang , Jue Wang , Liangjun Zang , Zhongyuan Wang , Songlin Hu

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has become the standard approach for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences, allowing LLMs to demonstrate remarkable abilities in various tasks. Existing methods work…

Recommender systems suffer from biases that cause the collected feedback to incompletely reveal user preference. While debiasing learning has been extensively studied, they mostly focused on the specialized (called counterfactual) test…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 SeongKu Kang , Jianxun Lian , Dongha Lee , Wonbin Kweon , Sanghwan Jang , Jaehyun Lee , Jindong Wang , Xing Xie , Hwanjo Yu

We apply preference modeling and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to finetune language models to act as helpful and harmless assistants. We find this alignment training improves performance on almost all NLP evaluations,…

Hand-crafting high quality prompts to optimize the performance of language models is a complicated and labor-intensive process. Furthermore, when migrating to newer, smaller, or weaker models (possibly due to latency or cost gains), prompts…

Reinforcement learning is a general method for learning in sequential settings, but it can often be difficult to specify a good reward function when the task is complex. In these cases, preference feedback or expert demonstrations can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-20 Jason R Brown , Carl Henrik Ek , Robert D Mullins