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Aligning language models (LMs) to human preferences has emerged as a critical pursuit, enabling these models to better serve diverse user needs. Existing methods primarily focus on optimizing LMs for a single reward function, limiting their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Ruizhe Shi , Yifang Chen , Yushi Hu , Alisa Liu , Hannaneh Hajishirzi , Noah A. Smith , Simon S. Du

A key challenge in applying reinforcement learning (RL) to diffusion large language models (dLLMs) lies in the intractability of their likelihood functions, which are essential for the RL objective, necessitating corresponding approximation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Nianyi Lin , Jiajie Zhang , Lei Hou , Juanzi Li

The application of Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) to mathematical and coding domains has demonstrated significant improvements in the reasoning and problem-solving abilities of Large Language Models. Despite its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Farid Bagirov , Mikhail Arkhipov , Ksenia Sycheva , Evgeniy Glukhov , Egor Bogomolov

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values and safety constraints is challenging, especially when objectives like helpfulness, truthfulness, and avoidance of harm conflict. Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-31 Xuying Li , Zhuo Li , Yuji Kosuga , Victor Bian

Maximum a posteriori decoding, a commonly used method for neural machine translation (NMT), aims to maximize the estimated posterior probability. However, high estimated probability does not always lead to high translation quality. Minimum…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Boxuan Lyu , Hidetaka Kamigaito , Kotaro Funakoshi , Manabu Okumura

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) or Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) are two key steps in the post-training of modern Language Models (LMs). A common problem is reward hacking, where the policy may exploit inaccuracies of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Johannes Ackermann , Michael Noukhovitch , Takashi Ishida , Masashi Sugiyama

Test-time scaling enhances large language model performance by allocating additional compute resources during inference. Best-of-N (BoN) sampling serves as a common sampling-based scaling technique, broadening the search space in parallel…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Yiming Wang , Pei Zhang , Siyuan Huang , Baosong Yang , Zhuosheng Zhang , Fei Huang , Rui Wang

Recent studies have indicated that effectively utilizing inference-time compute is crucial for attaining better performance from large language models (LLMs). In this work, we propose a novel inference-aware fine-tuning paradigm, in which…

Reward models trained on human preference data have been proven to effectively align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human intent within the framework of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). However, current reward models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Rui Yang , Ruomeng Ding , Yong Lin , Huan Zhang , Tong Zhang

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) to cater to different human preferences, learning new skills, and unlearning harmful behavior is an important problem. Search-based methods, such as Best-of-N or Monte-Carlo Tree Search, are performant,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-13 Seungwook Han , Idan Shenfeld , Akash Srivastava , Yoon Kim , Pulkit Agrawal

Existing alignment methods directly use the reward model learned from user preference data to optimize an LLM policy, subject to KL regularization with respect to the base policy. This practice is suboptimal for maximizing user's utility…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Haichuan Wang , Tao Lin , Lingkai Kong , Ce Li , Hezi Jiang , Milind Tambe

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a key driver of quality and safety in state-of-the-art large language models. Yet, a surprisingly simple and strong inference-time strategy is Best-of-N sampling that selects the best…

Inference-time computation offers a powerful axis for scaling the performance of language models. However, naively increasing computation in techniques like Best-of-N sampling can lead to performance degradation due to reward hacking.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-09 Audrey Huang , Adam Block , Qinghua Liu , Nan Jiang , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Dylan J. Foster

Recent years have seen a rapid surge in research leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for recommendation. These methods typically employ supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to adapt LLMs to recommendation scenarios, and utilize beam search…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Weiqin Yang , Bohao Wang , Zhenxiang Xu , Jiawei Chen , Shengjia Zhang , Jingbang Chen , Canghong Jin , Can Wang

Minimum Bayes risk (MBR) decoding is a decision rule of text generation tasks that outperforms conventional maximum a posterior (MAP) decoding using beam search by selecting high-quality outputs based on a utility function rather than those…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Hiroyuki Deguchi , Yusuke Sakai , Hidetaka Kamigaito , Taro Watanabe

Accurately aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences is crucial for informing fair, economically sound, and statistically efficient decision-making processes. However, we argue that the predominant approach for aligning…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-08-26 Jiancong Xiao , Ziniu Li , Xingyu Xie , Emily Getzen , Cong Fang , Qi Long , Weijie J. Su

Best-of-N (BoN) sampling, a common strategy for test-time scaling of Large Language Models (LLMs), relies on reward models to select the best candidate solution from multiple generations. However, traditional reward models often assign…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-20 Yantao Liu , Zijun Yao , Rui Min , Yixin Cao , Lei Hou , Juanzi Li

Many strong decoding methods for text generation follow a sample-and-rerank paradigm: they draw multiple candidates, score each under a utility (reward) function using consensus across samples, and return the best one. Although effective,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Yuki Ichihara , Yuu Jinnai , Kaito Ariu , Eiji Uchibe

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback has become the standard paradigm for language model alignment, where reward models directly determine alignment effectiveness. In this work, we focus on how to evaluate the generalizability of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Yangyang Zhou , Yi-Chen Li

Designing reward functions for continuous-control robotics often leads to subtle misalignments or reward hacking, especially in complex tasks. Preference-based RL mitigates some of these pitfalls by learning rewards from comparative…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Anukriti Singh , Amisha Bhaskar , Peihong Yu , Souradip Chakraborty , Ruthwik Dasyam , Amrit Bedi , Pratap Tokekar