English
Related papers

Related papers: Inference Time Alignment with Reward-Guided Tree S…

200 papers

Large reasoning models (LRMs) achieve strong performance by producing long chains of thought, but their inference costs are high and often generate redundant reasoning. Small language models (SLMs) are far more efficient, yet struggle on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Haojin Wang , Yike Wang , Shangbin Feng , Hannaneh Hajishirzi , Yulia Tsvetkov

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely adopted in post-training for large language models (LLMs) at scale. Recently, the incentivization of reasoning capabilities in LLMs from RL indicates that $\textit{proper learning methods could…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Zijun Liu , Peiyi Wang , Runxin Xu , Shirong Ma , Chong Ruan , Peng Li , Yang Liu , Yu Wu

Aligning Large Language Models (LLM) to address subjectivity and nuanced preference levels requires adequate flexibility and control, which can be a resource-intensive and time-consuming procedure. Existing training-time alignment methods…

Actively inferring user preferences, for example by asking good questions, is important for any human-facing decision-making system. Active inference allows such systems to adapt and personalize themselves to nuanced individual preferences.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-27 Wasu Top Piriyakulkij , Volodymyr Kuleshov , Kevin Ellis

Many applications of large language models (LLMs) require deductive reasoning, yet models frequently produce incorrect or redundant inference steps. We frame natural language inference as a search problem where the final answer is the valid…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Andreas Opedal , Francesco Ignazio Re , Abulhair Saparov , Mrinmaya Sachan , Bernhard Schölkopf , Ryan Cotterell

Diffusion language models (DLMs) have recently emerged as a compelling alternative to autoregressive generation, offering parallel generation and improved global coherence. During inference, DLMs generate text by iteratively denoising…

Adapting a pretrained diffusion model to new objectives at inference time remains an open problem in generative modeling. Existing steering methods suffer from inaccurate value estimation, especially at high noise levels, which biases…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-27 Vineet Jain , Kusha Sareen , Mohammad Pedramfar , Siamak Ravanbakhsh

Large Language Models (LLMs) acquire extensive knowledge and remarkable abilities from extensive text corpora, making them powerful tools for various applications. To make LLMs more usable, aligning them with human preferences is essential.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-21 Mozhi Zhang , Pengyu Wang , Chenkun Tan , Mianqiu Huang , Dong Zhang , Yaqian Zhou , Xipeng Qiu

With the rapid development of large language models (LLMs), they are not only used as general-purpose AI assistants but are also customized through further fine-tuning to meet the requirements of different applications. A pivotal factor in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-23 Pengyu Wang , Dong Zhang , Linyang Li , Chenkun Tan , Xinghao Wang , Ke Ren , Botian Jiang , Xipeng Qiu

Inference-time steering methods offer a lightweight alternative to fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) by modifying internal activations at test time without updating model weights. However, most…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Duy Nguyen , Archiki Prasad , Elias Stengel-Eskin , Mohit Bansal

Inference-time scaling techniques have shown promise in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). While recent research has primarily focused on training-time optimization, our work highlights inference-time…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Jiachun Li , Pengfei Cao , Zhuoran Jin , Yubo Chen , Jiexin Xu , Huaijun Li , Xiaojian Jiang , Kang Liu , Jun Zhao

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities, yet their outputs often suffer from misalignment with human preferences due to the inadequacy of weak supervision and a lack of fine-grained control. Training-time alignment…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-05 Zhenyu Ding , Yuhao Wang , Tengyue Xiao , Haoying Wang , Caigui Jiang , Ning Ding

A common paradigm to improve the performance of large language models is optimizing for a reward model. Reward models assign a numerical score to an LLM's output that indicates, for example, how likely it is to align with user preferences…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-06 Hadi Khalaf , Claudio Mayrink Verdun , Alex Oesterling , Himabindu Lakkaraju , Flavio du Pin Calmon

Inference-time alignment provides an efficient alternative for aligning LLMs with humans. However, these approaches still face challenges, such as limited scalability due to policy-specific value functions and latency during the inference…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Ruizhe Chen , Wenhao Chai , Zhifei Yang , Xiaotian Zhang , Joey Tianyi Zhou , Tony Quek , Soujanya Poria , Zuozhu Liu

Aligning large language models with human objectives is paramount, yet common approaches including RLHF suffer from unstable and resource-intensive training. In response to this challenge, we introduce ARGS, Alignment as Reward-Guided…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-06 Maxim Khanov , Jirayu Burapacheep , Yixuan Li

Large language models (LLMs) are known for their exceptional performance across a range of natural language processing tasks, but their deployment comes at a high computational and financial cost. On the other hand, smaller language models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-24 Adarsh MS , Jithin VG , Ditto PS

Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit strong linguistic abilities while remaining unreliable on multi-step reasoning tasks, particularly when deployed without additional training or fine-tuning. In this work, we study inference-time…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Vinay Sharma , Manish Jain

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences through reinforcement learning (RLHF) can lead to reward hacking, where LLMs exploit failures in the reward model (RM) to achieve seemingly high rewards without meeting the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-23 Alexandre Ramé , Nino Vieillard , Léonard Hussenot , Robert Dadashi , Geoffrey Cideron , Olivier Bachem , Johan Ferret

Inference-time techniques, such as repeated sampling or iterative revisions, are emerging as powerful ways to enhance large-language models (LLMs) at test time. However, best practices for developing systems that combine these techniques…

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive capabilities but require careful alignment with human preferences. Traditional training-time methods finetune LLMs using human preference datasets but incur significant training costs and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Yuancheng Xu , Udari Madhushani Sehwag , Alec Koppel , Sicheng Zhu , Bang An , Furong Huang , Sumitra Ganesh