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Related papers: InfAlign: Inference-aware language model alignment

200 papers

As large language models increasingly drive real-world applications, aligning them with human values becomes paramount. Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a key technique, translating preference data into…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-07 Yunzhen Feng , Ariel Kwiatkowski , Kunhao Zheng , Julia Kempe , Yaqi Duan

Reward Modeling is critical in evaluating and improving the generation of Large Language Models (LLMs). While numerous recent works have shown its feasibility in improving safety, helpfulness, reasoning, and instruction-following ability,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Hanning Zhang , Juntong Song , Juno Zhu , Yuanhao Wu , Tong Zhang , Cheng Niu

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a powerful technique to make large language models (LLMs) more capable in complex settings. RLHF proceeds as collecting human preference data, training a reward model on said…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-05 Nathan Lambert , Roberto Calandra

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in reasoning, yet sometimes produce responses that are suboptimal for users in tasks such as writing, information seeking, or providing practical guidance. Conventional…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Siqi Zhu , David Zhang , Pedro Cisneros-Velarde , Jiaxuan You

Mainstream approaches to aligning large language models (LLMs) heavily rely on human preference data, particularly when models require periodic updates. The standard process for iterative alignment of LLMs involves collecting new human…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Chen Zhang , Chengguang Tang , Dading Chong , Ke Shi , Guohua Tang , Feng Jiang , Haizhou Li

The objectives that Large Language Models (LLMs) implicitly optimize remain dangerously opaque, making trustworthy alignment and auditing a grand challenge. While Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) can infer reward functions from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-09 Matthieu Bou , Nyal Patel , Arjun Jagota , Satyapriya Krishna , Sonali Parbhoo

As instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) evolve, aligning pretrained foundation models presents increasing challenges. Existing alignment strategies, which typically leverage diverse and high-quality data sources, often overlook…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-10 Yikun Wang , Rui Zheng , Liang Ding , Qi Zhang , Dahua Lin , Dacheng Tao

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a framework for solving sequential decision-making problems. In this work, we demonstrate that, surprisingly, RL emerges during the inference time of large language models (LLMs), a phenomenon we term…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Kefan Song , Amir Moeini , Peng Wang , Lei Gong , Rohan Chandra , Shangtong Zhang , Yanjun Qi

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant progress in performing complex tasks. While Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has been effective in aligning LLMs with human preferences, it is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Chaoqi Wang , Zhuokai Zhao , Yibo Jiang , Zhaorun Chen , Chen Zhu , Yuxin Chen , Jiayi Liu , Lizhu Zhang , Xiangjun Fan , Hao Ma , Sinong Wang

Scaling test-time computation with reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a reliable path to improve large language models (LLM) reasoning ability. Yet, outcome-based reward often incentivizes models to be overconfident, leading to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Liaoyaqi Wang , Chunsheng Zuo , William Jurayj , Benjamin Van Durme , Anqi Liu

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

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 alignment techniques offer a lightweight alternative or complement to costly reinforcement learning, while enabling continual adaptation as alignment objectives and reward targets evolve. Existing theoretical analyses justify…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Ye Wang , Jing Liu , Toshiaki Koike-Akino

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been used recently to align diffusion models with downstream objectives such as aesthetic quality and text-image consistency by fine-tuning them to maximize a single reward function under a fixed…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Min Cheng , Fatemeh Doudi , Dileep Kalathil , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Panganamala R. Kumar

Faithful text rendering remains a persistent weakness of large text-to-image generative models, as it requires both semantic instruction following and fine-grained glyph-level structure. Prior methods often improve this ability through…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Mingxuan Cui , Jingpu Yang , Fengxian Ji , Qian Jiang , Zhecheng Shi , Jiaming Wang , Zirui Song , Fajri Koto , Xiuying Chen

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

This paper investigates the so-called reward-balancing methods, a novel class of algorithms for solving discounted-return reinforcement learning (RL) problems. These methods consist of iteratively adjusting the reward function to transform…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-23 Simone Baroncini , Bahman Gharesifard , Giuseppe Notarstefano

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

Language models must be adapted to understand and follow user instructions. Reinforcement learning is widely used to facilitate this -- typically using fixed criteria such as "helpfulness" and "harmfulness". In our work, we instead propose…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Vijay Viswanathan , Yanchao Sun , Shuang Ma , Xiang Kong , Meng Cao , Graham Neubig , Tongshuang Wu

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