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As large language models (LLMs) continue to advance, ensuring their alignment with human values becomes increasingly critical. Traditional alignment methods heavily rely on human feedback to fine-tune models. With the emergence of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-26 Ruimeng Ye , Yang Xiao , Bo Hui

Common methods for aligning already-capable models with desired behavior rely on the ability of humans to provide supervision. However, future superhuman models will surpass the capability of humans. Therefore, humans will only be able to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-24 Hao Lang , Fei Huang , Yongbin Li

Weak-to-strong (W2S) generalization is a type of finetuning (FT) where a strong (large) student model is trained on pseudo-labels generated by a weak teacher. Surprisingly, W2S FT often outperforms the weak teacher. We seek to understand…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Yijun Dong , Yicheng Li , Yunai Li , Jason D. Lee , Qi Lei

Weak-to-strong generalization (W2SG) has emerged as a promising paradigm for stimulating the capabilities of strong pre-trained models by leveraging supervision from weaker supervisors. To improve the performance of the strong model,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Wei Yao , Gengze Xu , Huayi Tang , Wenkai Yang , Donglin Di , Ziqiao Wang , Yong Liu

We initiate a unified theoretical and algorithmic study of a key problem in weak-to-strong (W2S) generalization: when fine-tuning a strong pre-trained student with pseudolabels from a weaker teacher on a downstream task with spurious…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Chenruo Liu , Yijun Dong , Qi Lei

The weak-to-strong generalization phenomenon is the driver for important machine learning applications including highly data-efficient learning and, most recently, performing superalignment. While decades of research have resulted in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Changho Shin , John Cooper , Frederic Sala

The paradigm of Weak-to-Strong Generalization (W2SG) suggests that a pre-trained strong model can surpass its weak supervisor, yet the decisive role of pre-training remains theoretically and empirically under-explored. In this work, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Wei Yao , Wang Zhaoyang , Gengze Xu , Chen Qian , Dongrui Liu , Ziqiao Wang , Yong Liu , Yunbei Xu

We study generalization properties of weakly supervised learning. That is, learning where only a few "strong" labels (the actual target of our prediction) are present but many more "weak" labels are available. In particular, we show that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-21 Joshua Robinson , Stefanie Jegelka , Suvrit Sra

Large language models are usually fine-tuned to align with human preferences. However, fine-tuning a large language model can be challenging. In this work, we introduce $\textit{weak-to-strong search}$, framing the alignment of a large…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-20 Zhanhui Zhou , Zhixuan Liu , Jie Liu , Zhichen Dong , Chao Yang , Yu Qiao

Weak-to-Strong generalization (W2SG) is a new trend to elicit the full capabilities of a strong model with supervision from a weak model. While existing W2SG studies focus on simple tasks like binary classification, we extend this paradigm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Ruimeng Ye , Zihan Wang , Yang Xiao , Zinan Ling , Manling Li , Bo Hui

With Large Language Models (LLMs) rapidly approaching and potentially surpassing human-level performance, it has become imperative to develop approaches capable of effectively supervising and enhancing these powerful models using smaller,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Aakriti Agrawal , Mucong Ding , Zora Che , Chenghao Deng , Anirudh Satheesh , Bang An , Bayan Bruss , John Langford , Furong Huang

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence systems has brought the challenge of AI alignment to the forefront of research, particularly in complex decision-making and task execution. As these systems surpass human-level performance in…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-09-12 Mehrdad Zakershahrak , Samira Ghodratnama

Standard techniques for aligning large language models (LLMs) utilize human-produced data, which could limit the capability of any aligned LLM to human level. Label refinement and weak training have emerged as promising strategies to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-08-26 Seamus Somerstep , Ya'acov Ritov , Mikhail Yurochkin , Subha Maity , Yuekai Sun

As future superhuman models become increasingly complex, accurately supervising their behavior may exceed human capabilities. Recent works have demonstrated that in such scenarios, weak models can effectively supervise strong models, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Myeongho Jeon , Jan Sobotka , Suhwan Choi , Maria Brbić

With Large Language Models (LLMs) rapidly approaching and potentially surpassing human-level performance, it has become imperative to develop approaches capable of effectively supervising and enhancing these powerful models using smaller,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-24 Aakriti Agrawal , Mucong Ding , Zora Che , Chenghao Deng , Anirudh Satheesh , Bang An , Bayan Bruss , John Langford , Furong Huang

How can we train models to perform well on hard test data when hard training data is by definition difficult to label correctly? This question has been termed the scalable oversight problem and has drawn increasing attention as language…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Peter Hase , Mohit Bansal , Peter Clark , Sarah Wiegreffe

Aligning language models (LMs) with human preferences has become a key area of research, enabling these models to meet diverse user needs better. Inspired by weak-to-strong generalization, where a strong LM fine-tuned on labels generated by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-07 Wenhong Zhu , Zhiwei He , Xiaofeng Wang , Pengfei Liu , Rui Wang

Weak-to-strong generalization (W2SG) refers to the phenomenon where a strong student model, trained on a dataset labeled by a weak teacher, ultimately outperforms the teacher on the target task. Recent studies attribute this performance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Gengze Xu , Wei Yao , Ziqiao Wang , Yong Liu

Many promising applications of supervised machine learning face hurdles in the acquisition of labeled data in sufficient quantity and quality, creating an expensive bottleneck. To overcome such limitations, techniques that do not depend on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-14 Benedikt Boecking , Nicholas Roberts , Willie Neiswanger , Stefano Ermon , Frederic Sala , Artur Dubrawski

Neural network approaches have recently shown to be effective in several information retrieval (IR) tasks. However, neural approaches often require large volumes of training data to perform effectively, which is not always available. To…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2018-06-14 Hamed Zamani , W. Bruce Croft