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Related papers: Asymptotics of Language Model Alignment

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Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit implicit biases and discriminatory tendencies that reflect underlying social stereotypes. While recent alignment techniques such as RLHF and DPO have mitigated some of these issues, they remain…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Deng Yixuan , Ji Xiaoqiang

Large language models (LLMs) solve reasoning problems by first generating a rationale and then answering. We formalize reasoning as a latent variable model and derive a reward-based filtered expectation-maximization (FEM) objective for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Junghyun Lee , Branislav Kveton , Anup Rao , Subhojyoti Mukherjee , Ryan A. Rossi , Sunav Choudhary , Alexa Siu

The endeavor of artificial intelligence (AI) is to design autonomous agents capable of achieving complex tasks. Namely, reinforcement learning (RL) proposes a theoretical background to learn optimal behaviors. In practice, RL algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-27 Firas Jarboui , Ahmed Akakzia

Existing training criteria in automatic speech recognition(ASR) permit the model to freely explore more than one time alignments between the feature and label sequences. In this paper, we use entropy to measure a model's uncertainty, i.e.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-12-26 Ehsan Variani , Ke Wu , David Rybach , Cyril Allauzen , Michael Riley

We propose a large language model based reward decomposition framework for aligning dialogue agents using only a single session-level feedback signal. We leverage the reasoning capabilities of a frozen, pretrained large language model (LLM)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Dong Won Lee , Hae Won Park , Cynthia Breazeal , Louis-Philippe Morency

Large language models~(LLMs) are expected to be helpful, harmless, and honest. In different alignment scenarios, such as safety, confidence, and general preference alignment, binary preference data collection and reward modeling are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Shuai Zhao , Yunqiu Xu , Linchao Zhu , Yi Yang

Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning (RL) problems often have access to sparse rewards where the agent receives a reward signal only when it has achieved the goal, making policy optimization a difficult problem. Several works augment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-11 Siddhant Agarwal , Ishan Durugkar , Peter Stone , Amy Zhang

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is currently the most widely used method to align large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. Existing RLHF methods can be roughly categorized as either reward-based or reward-free.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-11 Shusheng Xu , Wei Fu , Jiaxuan Gao , Wenjie Ye , Weilin Liu , Zhiyu Mei , Guangju Wang , Chao Yu , Yi Wu

While large-scale unsupervised language models (LMs) learn broad world knowledge and some reasoning skills, achieving precise control of their behavior is difficult due to the completely unsupervised nature of their training. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-31 Rafael Rafailov , Archit Sharma , Eric Mitchell , Stefano Ermon , Christopher D. Manning , Chelsea Finn

Large language models (LLMs) are often sycophantic, prioritizing agreement with their users over accurate or objective statements. This problematic behavior becomes more pronounced during reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF),…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Henry Papadatos , Rachel Freedman

While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at generating human-like text, aligning their outputs with complex, qualitative goals like pedagogical soundness remains a significant challenge. Standard reinforcement learning techniques often rely…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-17 Francesco Pappone , Ruggero Marino Lazzaroni , Federico Califano , Niccolò Gentile , Roberto Marras

When language models (LMs) are trained via reinforcement learning (RL) to generate natural language "reasoning chains", their performance improves on a variety of difficult question answering tasks. Today, almost all successful applications…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Mehul Damani , Isha Puri , Stewart Slocum , Idan Shenfeld , Leshem Choshen , Yoon Kim , Jacob Andreas

Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) have renewed interest in reward design for shaping agent behavior, but manually crafting reward functions is tedious and error-prone. A principled alternative is to specify behavioral…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Milad Kazemi , Mateo Perez , Fabio Somenzi , Sadegh Soudjani , Ashutosh Trivedi , Alvaro Velasquez

The growing disparity between the exponential scaling of computational resources and the finite growth of high-quality text data now constrains conventional scaling approaches for large language models (LLMs). To address this challenge, we…

In reinforcement learning, two objective functions have been developed extensively in the literature: discounted and averaged rewards. The generalization to an entropy-regularized setting has led to improved robustness and exploration for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-20 Jacob Adamczyk , Volodymyr Makarenko , Stas Tiomkin , Rahul V. Kulkarni

Learning to rank (LTR) plays a crucial role in various Information Retrieval (IR) tasks. Although supervised LTR methods based on fine-grained relevance labels (e.g., document-level annotations) have achieved significant success, their…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-08-21 Yiteng Tu , Zhichao Xu , Tao Yang , Weihang Su , Yujia Zhou , Yiqun Liu , Fen Lin , Qin Liu , Qingyao Ai

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences typically relies on external supervision, which faces critical limitations: human annotations are scarce and subjective, reward models are vulnerable to reward hacking, and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Yixuan Tang , Yi Yang

Long chain-of-thought (CoT) significantly enhances the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, extensive reasoning traces lead to inefficiencies and increased time-to-first-token (TTFT). We propose a training…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Roy Xie , David Qiu , Deepak Gopinath , Dong Lin , Yanchao Sun , Chong Wang , Saloni Potdar , Bhuwan Dhingra

Bus holding control is a widely-adopted strategy for maintaining stability and improving the operational efficiency of bus systems. Traditional model-based methods often face challenges with the low accuracy of bus state prediction and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Jiajie Yu , Yuhong Wang , Wei Ma

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is the standard method to align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences. In this work, we introduce alignment tampering, a potential vulnerability where the LLM undergoing…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Dongyoon Hahm , Dylan Hadfield-Menell , Kimin Lee