English
Related papers

Related papers: Pairwise Calibrated Rewards for Pluralistic Alignm…

200 papers

Aligning language models to human expectations, e.g., being helpful and harmless, has become a pressing challenge for large language models. A typical alignment procedure consists of supervised fine-tuning and preference learning. Most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Tianchi Cai , Xierui Song , Jiyan Jiang , Fei Teng , Jinjie Gu , Guannan Zhang

While reinforcement learning for large language model alignment has progressed rapidly in recent years, transferring these paradigms to high-stakes medical question answering reveals a fundamental paradigm mismatch. Reinforcement Learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Tianxiang Xu , Jiayi Liu , Yixuan Tong , Jialu Xu , Yunqing Wei , Kaiwen Feng , PanPan Hou , Kangping Yin , Jiyuan Hu , Hao Zhou , Zhenxin Ma , Jian Xu , Guanjun Jiang

In this paper we model the problem of learning preferences of a population as an active learning problem. We propose an algorithm can adaptively choose pairs of items to show to users coming from a heterogeneous population, and use the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-06-23 Aniruddha Bhargava , Ravi Ganti , Robert Nowak

Preference-based alignment methods (e.g., RLHF, DPO) typically optimize a single scalar objective, implicitly averaging over heterogeneous human preferences. In practice, systematic annotator and user-group disagreement makes mean-reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Mingxi Zou , Jiaxiang Chen , Junfan Li , Langzhang Liang , Qifan Wang , Xu Yinghui , Zenglin Xu

Supervised machine learning often requires human-annotated data. While annotator disagreement is typically interpreted as evidence of noise, population-level label distribution learning (PLDL) treats the collection of annotations for each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-22 Tharindu Cyril Weerasooriya , Tong Liu , Christopher M. Homan

Given the broad capabilities of large language models, it should be possible to work towards a general-purpose, text-based assistant that is aligned with human values, meaning that it is helpful, honest, and harmless. As an initial foray in…

We study the problem of learning to rank from pairwise preferences, and solve a long-standing open problem that has led to development of many heuristics but no provable results for our particular problem. Given a set $V$ of $n$ elements,…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2011-05-18 Nir Ailon

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

Despite their sophisticated general-purpose capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) often fail to align with diverse individual preferences because standard post-training methods, like Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF),…

Understanding the quality of a performance evaluation metric is crucial for ensuring that model outputs align with human preferences. However, it remains unclear how well each metric captures the diverse aspects of these preferences, as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Genta Indra Winata , David Anugraha , Lucky Susanto , Garry Kuwanto , Derry Tanti Wijaya

We study estimation and statistical inference for reward models used in aligning large language models (LLMs). A key component of LLM alignment is reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), where humans compare pairs of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-04 Pangpang Liu , Junwei Lu , Will Wei Sun

Alignment techniques for LLMs rely on optimizing preference-based objectives -- where these preferences are typically elicited as ordinal, binary choices between responses. Recent work has focused on improving label quality or mitigating…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-13 Parker Whitfill , Stewy Slocum

Learning rewards from preference feedback has become an important tool in the alignment of agentic models. Preference-based feedback, often implemented as a binary comparison between multiple completions, is an established method to acquire…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Yannick Metz , András Geiszl , Raphaël Baur , Mennatallah El-Assady

The potential of reinforcement learning (RL) to deliver aligned and performant agents is partially bottlenecked by the reward engineering problem. One alternative to heuristic trial-and-error is preference-based RL (PbRL), where a reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-22 Tom Bewley , Freddy Lecue

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

Learning contrastive representations from pairwise comparisons has achieved remarkable success in various fields, such as natural language processing, computer vision, and information retrieval. Collaborative filtering algorithms based on…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-08-01 Bin Liu , Qin Luo , Bang Wang

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has been an effective technique for aligning AI systems with human values, with remarkable successes in fine-tuning large-language models recently. Most existing RLHF paradigms make the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Chanwoo Park , Mingyang Liu , Dingwen Kong , Kaiqing Zhang , Asuman Ozdaglar

Aligning language models (LMs) based on human-annotated preference data is a crucial step in obtaining practical and performant LM-based systems. However, multilingual human preference data are difficult to obtain at scale, making it…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Zhaofeng Wu , Ananth Balashankar , Yoon Kim , Jacob Eisenstein , Ahmad Beirami

Human-annotated data plays a critical role in the fairness of AI systems, including those that deal with life-altering decisions or moderating human-created web/social media content. Conventionally, annotator disagreements are resolved…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-07-21 Tharindu Cyril Weerasooriya , Sarah Luger , Saloni Poddar , Ashiqur R. KhudaBukhsh , Christopher M. Homan

A key challenge in reward learning from human input is that desired agent behavior often changes based on context. For example, a robot must adapt to avoid a stove once it becomes hot. We observe that while high-level preferences (e.g.,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Alexandra Forsey-Smerek , Julie Shah , Andreea Bobu