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Reward models are critical for aligning models to follow instructions, and are typically trained following one of two popular paradigms: Bradley-Terry style or Regression style. However, there is a lack of evidence that either approach is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-07 Zhilin Wang , Alexander Bukharin , Olivier Delalleau , Daniel Egert , Gerald Shen , Jiaqi Zeng , Oleksii Kuchaiev , Yi Dong

Reinforcement Learning frameworks, particularly those utilizing human annotations, have become an increasingly popular method for preference fine-tuning, where the outputs of a language model are tuned to match a certain set of behavioral…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Archie Chaudhury

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a widely used framework for the training of language models. However, the process of using RLHF to develop a language model that is well-aligned presents challenges, especially when it…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-09 Bowen Qin , Duanyu Feng , Xi Yang

Direct Preference Learning has emerged as a dominant offline paradigm for preference optimization. Most of these methods are based on the Bradley-Terry (BT) model for pairwise preference ranking, which directly aligns language model with…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Chengtao Jian , Kai Yang , Tianhao Gao , Wuguang Ni , Keying Yang , Bowen Xiao , Jiajun Liu , Ye Ouyang

Designing reward functions is a challenging problem in AI and robotics. Humans usually have a difficult time directly specifying all the desirable behaviors that a robot needs to optimize. One common approach is to learn reward functions…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-06-05 Erdem Bıyık , Nicolas Huynh , Mykel J. Kochenderfer , Dorsa Sadigh

Alignment of large language models (LLMs) has predominantly relied on pairwise preference optimization, where annotators select the better of two responses to a prompt. While simple, this approach overlooks the opportunity to learn from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Yuxuan Tang , Yifan Feng

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has shown great potential in fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) to align with human preferences. Existing methods perform preference alignment from a fixed dataset, which can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Chenjia Bai , Yang Zhang , Shuang Qiu , Qiaosheng Zhang , Kang Xu , Xuelong Li

Faithfulness, expressiveness, and elegance is the constant pursuit in machine translation. However, traditional metrics like \textit{BLEU} do not strictly align with human preference of translation quality. In this paper, we explore…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-28 Nuo Xu , Jun Zhao , Can Zu , Sixian Li , Lu Chen , Zhihao Zhang , Rui Zheng , Shihan Dou , Wenjuan Qin , Tao Gui , Qi Zhang , Xuanjing Huang

This paper studies the alignment process of generative models with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). We first identify the primary challenges of existing popular methods like offline PPO and offline DPO as lacking in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-02 Wei Xiong , Hanze Dong , Chenlu Ye , Ziqi Wang , Han Zhong , Heng Ji , Nan Jiang , Tong Zhang

The generated responses of large language models (LLMs) are often fine-tuned to human preferences through a process called reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). As RLHF relies on a challenging training sequence, whereby a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Xiangkun Hu , Lemin Kong , Tong He , David Wipf

Since the debut of DPO, it has been shown that aligning a target LLM with human preferences via the KL-constrained RLHF loss is mathematically equivalent to a special kind of reward modeling task. Concretely, the task requires: 1) using the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-19 Yuzhong Hong , Hanshan Zhang , Junwei Bao , Hongfei Jiang , Yang Song

The success of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) in language model alignment is strongly dependent on the quality of the underlying reward model. In this paper, we present a novel approach to improve reward model quality by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Alizée Pace , Jonathan Mallinson , Eric Malmi , Sebastian Krause , Aliaksei Severyn

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a de-facto approach for aligning language models with human preferences. Recent work has shown DPO's effectiveness relies on training data quality. In particular, clear quality differences…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-28 Nirav Diwan , Tolga Ergen , Dongsub Shim , Honglak Lee

Aligning large language models (LLMs) to preference data typically assumes a known link function between observed preferences and latent rewards (e.g., a logistic Bradley-Terry link). Misspecification of this link can bias inferred rewards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Nathan Kallus

Preference learning (PL) with large language models (LLMs) aims to align the LLMs' generations with human preferences. Previous work on reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has demonstrated promising results in in-distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Chen Jia

Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) has achieved great success in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. Prevalent RLHF approaches are reward-based, following the Bradley-Terry (BT) model assumption,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Yuheng Zhang , Dian Yu , Baolin Peng , Linfeng Song , Ye Tian , Mingyue Huo , Nan Jiang , Haitao Mi , Dong Yu

The complexity of designing reward functions has been a major obstacle to the wide application of deep reinforcement learning (RL) techniques. Describing an agent's desired behaviors and properties can be difficult, even for experts. A new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-09 Wanqi Xue , Bo An , Shuicheng Yan , Zhongwen Xu

Aligning multimodal large language models (MLLMs) with human preferences often relies on single-signal, model-based reward methods. Such monolithic rewards often lack confidence calibration across domain-specific tasks, fail to capture…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Radha Gulhane , Sathish Reddy Indurthi

The standard way to evaluate language models on subjective tasks is through pairwise comparisons: an annotator chooses the "better" of two responses to a prompt. Leaderboards aggregate these comparisons into a single Bradley-Terry (BT)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Hadi Khalaf , Serena L. Wang , Daniel Halpern , Itai Shapira , Flavio du Pin Calmon , Ariel D. Procaccia

Designing a reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) algorithm to approximate a human's unobservable reward function requires assuming, implicitly or explicitly, a model of human preferences. A preference model that poorly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Stephane Hatgis-Kessell , W. Bradley Knox , Serena Booth , Peter Stone