English
Related papers

Related papers: Act-Adaptive Margin: Dynamically Calibrating Rewar…

200 papers

Self-evaluation, a model's ability to assess the correctness of its own output, is crucial for Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) to achieve self-improvement in multi-turn conversations, yet largely absent in foundation models. Recent work has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Wenkai Wang , Hongcan Guo , Zheqi Lv , Shengyu Zhang

Personalized alignment of large language models seeks to adapt responses to individual user preferences, typically via reinforcement learning. A key challenge is obtaining accurate, user-specific reward signals in open-ended scenarios.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Pinyi Zhang , Ting-En Lin , Yuchuan Wu , Jingyang Chen , Zongqi Wang , Hua Yang , Ze Xu , Fei Huang , Kai Zhang , Yongbin Li

Reward modeling is crucial for aligning large language models with human preferences, yet current approaches lack a principled mathematical framework for leveraging ordinal preference data. When human annotators provide graded preferences…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Amirhossein Afsharrad , Ruida Zhou , Luca Viano , Sanjay Lall , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh

We study a sequential mechanism design problem in which a principal seeks to elicit truthful reports from multiple rational agents while starting with no prior knowledge of agents' beliefs. We introduce Distributionally Robust Adaptive…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Qiushi Han , David Simchi-Levi , Renfei Tan , Zishuo Zhao

Reward models (RMs) play a pivotal role in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, traditional RM training, which relies on response pairs tied to specific prompts, struggles to disentangle prompt-driven…

In classical Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), Reward Models (RMs) serve as the fundamental signal provider for model alignment. As Large Language Models evolve into agentic systems capable of autonomous tool invocation and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Jiaxuan Wang , Yulan Hu , Wenjin Yang , Zheng Pan , Xin Li , Lan-Zhe Guo

Preference learning is critical for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values, with the quality of preference datasets playing a crucial role in this process. While existing metrics primarily assess data quality based on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Kexin Huang , Junkang Wu , Ziqian Chen , Xue Wang , Jinyang Gao , Bolin Ding , Jiancan Wu , Xiangnan He , Xiang Wang

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

Reward models (RMs) have become essential for aligning large language models (LLMs), serving as scalable proxies for human evaluation in both training and inference. However, existing RMs struggle on knowledge-intensive and long-form tasks,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-30 Ziyou Hu , Zhengliang Shi , Minghang Zhu , Haitao Li , Teng Sun , Pengjie Ren , Suzan Verberne , Zhaochun Ren

In this paper, we propose a new solution to reward adaptation (RA) in reinforcement learning, where the agent adapts to a target reward function based on one or more existing source behaviors learned a priori under the same domain dynamics…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Kevin Vora , Yu Zhang

Large language models (LLMs) fine-tuned with alignment techniques, such as reinforcement learning from human feedback, have been instrumental in developing some of the most capable AI systems to date. Despite their success, existing methods…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Kyuyoung Kim , Ah Jeong Seo , Hao Liu , Jinwoo Shin , Kimin Lee

Multi-agent reinforcement learning involves multiple agents interacting with each other and a shared environment to complete tasks. When rewards provided by the environment are sparse, agents may not receive immediate feedback on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-31 Baicen Xiao , Bhaskar Ramasubramanian , Radha Poovendran

Reward models (RMs) are central to reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), providing the critical supervision signals that align large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. Generative reward models (GRMs) provide greater…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Ai Jian , Jingqing Ruan , Xing Ma , Xiaoyun Zhang , Dailin Li , Weipeng Zhang , Ke Zeng , Xunliang Cai

Reward models (RMs) are central to the alignment of language models (LMs). An RM often serves as a proxy for human preferences to guide downstream LM behavior. However, our understanding of RM behavior is limited. Our work (i) formalizes a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-09 Elle

Modeling human preferences is crucial for aligning foundation models with human values. Traditional reward modeling methods, such as the Bradley-Terry (BT) reward model, fall short in expressiveness, particularly in addressing intransitive…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-12 Yifan Zhang , Ge Zhang , Yue Wu , Kangping Xu , Quanquan Gu

Designing reward functions for efficiently guiding reinforcement learning (RL) agents toward specific behaviors is a complex task. This is challenging since it requires the identification of reward structures that are not sparse and that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Dhawal Gupta , Yash Chandak , Scott M. Jordan , Philip S. Thomas , Bruno Castro da Silva

Agentic reinforcement learning (Agentic RL) has achieved strong progress in tasks with clear success signals. However, many real-world agent applications require user-conditioned behavior: the same query may call for different planning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Ranxu zhang , zeyang li , Jiacheng Huang , Rui Zhang , Xiaozhou Xu , sun zhe , Yanyong Zhang , Chao Wang

Standard Bradley--Terry (BT) reward models are limited when human preferences are pluralistic. Although soft preference labels preserve disagreement information, BT can only express it by shrinking reward margins. Gaussian reward models…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-13 Shuxing Fang , Ruijian Han , Liangyu Zhang , Fan Zhou

The evolution of technology and education is driving the emergence of Intelligent & Autonomous Tutoring Systems (IATS), where objective and domain-agnostic methods for determining question difficulty are essential. Traditional human…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Surajit Das , Gourav Roy , Aleksei Eliseev , Ram Kumar Rajendran

Adaptive gradient methods, such as Adam and LAMB, have demonstrated excellent performance in the training of large language models. Nevertheless, the need for adaptivity requires maintaining second-moment estimates of the per-parameter…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-08-08 Yang Luo , Xiaozhe Ren , Zangwei Zheng , Zhuo Jiang , Xin Jiang , Yang You