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Related papers: Revisiting Weak-to-Strong Generalization in Theory…

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Weak-to-strong (W2S) generalization, in which a strong model is fine-tuned on outputs of a weaker, task-specialized model, has been proposed as an approach to aligning superhuman AI systems. Existing theoretical analyses either fix the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-14 Ryoya Awano , Taiji Suzuki

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

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

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

Future superhuman models will surpass the ability of humans and humans will only be able to \textit{weakly} supervise superhuman models. To alleviate the issue of lacking high-quality data for model alignment, some works on weak-to-strong…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Hao Lang , Fei Huang , Yongbin Li

The classic teacher-student model in machine learning posits that a strong teacher supervises a weak student to improve the student's capabilities. We instead consider the inverted situation, where a weak teacher supervises a strong student…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-03 David X. Wu , Anant Sahai

The rapid proliferation of generative AI, especially large language models, has led to their integration into a variety of applications. A key phenomenon known as weak-to-strong generalization - where a strong model trained on a weak…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-03 Martin Pawelczyk , Lillian Sun , Zhenting Qi , Aounon Kumar , Himabindu Lakkaraju

Weak-to-Strong Generalization (Burns et al., 2024) is the phenomenon whereby a strong student, say GPT-4, learns a task from a weak teacher, say GPT-2, and ends up significantly outperforming the teacher. We show that this phenomenon does…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Marko Medvedev , Kaifeng Lyu , Dingli Yu , Sanjeev Arora , Zhiyuan Li , Nathan Srebro

State-of-the-art natural language understanding classification models follow two-stages: pre-training a large language model on an auxiliary task, and then fine-tuning the model on a task-specific labeled dataset using cross-entropy loss.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-04-06 Beliz Gunel , Jingfei Du , Alexis Conneau , Ves Stoyanov

Weak-to-strong generalization, where a student model trained on imperfect labels generated by a weaker teacher nonetheless surpasses that teacher, has been widely observed but the mechanisms that enable it have remained poorly understood.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-27 Behrad Moniri , Hamed Hassani

The prevailing approach to aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) typically relies on human or AI feedback and assumes access to specific types of preference datasets. In our work, we question the efficacy of such datasets and explore…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Hao Sun

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

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

Large language models (LLMs) have gained much attention in the recommendation community; some studies have observed that LLMs, fine-tuned by the cross-entropy loss with a full softmax, could achieve state-of-the-art performance already.…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-02-23 Cong Xu , Zhangchi Zhu , Jun Wang , Jianyong Wang , Wei Zhang

Weakly supervised learning is a popular approach for training machine learning models in low-resource settings. Instead of requesting high-quality yet costly human annotations, it allows training models with noisy annotations obtained from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-19 Dawei Zhu , Xiaoyu Shen , Marius Mosbach , Andreas Stephan , Dietrich Klakow

Reinforcement learning (RL) presents a promising framework to learn policies through environment interaction, but often requires an infeasible amount of interaction data to solve complex tasks from sparse rewards. One direction includes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Stone Tao , Arth Shukla , Tse-kai Chan , Hao Su

Large language models (LLMs) have a surprising failure: when trained on "A has a feature B", they do not generalize to "B is a feature of A", which is termed the Reversal Curse. Even when training with trillions of tokens this issue still…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-09 Olga Golovneva , Zeyuan Allen-Zhu , Jason Weston , Sainbayar Sukhbaatar

Contrastive Learning first extracts features from unlabeled data, followed by linear probing with labeled data. Adversarial Contrastive Learning (ACL) integrates Adversarial Training into the first phase to enhance feature robustness…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Ngoc N. Tran , Lam Tran , Hoang Phan , Anh Bui , Tung Pham , Toan Tran , Dinh Phung , Trung Le

Weak-to-strong alignment offers a promising route to scalable supervision, but it can fail when a strong model becomes confidently wrong on examples that lie in the weak teacher's blind spots. Understanding such failures requires going…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Hamid Osooli , Kareema Batool , Rick Gentry , Tiasa Singha Roy , Ashwin Gupta , Anirudha Ramesh

This paper addresses a new interpretation of the traditional optimization method in reinforcement learning (RL) as optimization problems using reverse Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, and derives a new optimization method using forward KL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-25 Taisuke Kobayashi