English
Related papers

Related papers: Reward Model Interpretability via Optimal and Pess…

200 papers

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback has become the standard paradigm for language model alignment, where reward models directly determine alignment effectiveness. In this work, we focus on how to evaluate the generalizability of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Yangyang Zhou , Yi-Chen Li

Reward learning enables the application of reinforcement learning (RL) to tasks where reward is defined by human judgment, building a model of reward by asking humans questions. Most work on reward learning has used simulated environments,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-01-10 Daniel M. Ziegler , Nisan Stiennon , Jeffrey Wu , Tom B. Brown , Alec Radford , Dario Amodei , Paul Christiano , Geoffrey Irving

Large language models are typically aligned with human preferences by optimizing $\textit{reward models}$ (RMs) fitted to human feedback. However, human preferences are multi-faceted, and it is increasingly common to derive reward from a…

Reward models are critical in techniques like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and Inference Scaling Laws, where they guide language model alignment and select optimal responses. Despite their importance, existing reward…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Yantao Liu , Zijun Yao , Rui Min , Yixin Cao , Lei Hou , Juanzi Li

In reinforcement learning (RL), agents continually interact with the environment and use the feedback to refine their behavior. To guide policy optimization, reward models are introduced as proxies of the desired objectives, such that when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Rui Yu , Shenghua Wan , Yucen Wang , Chen-Xiao Gao , Le Gan , Zongzhang Zhang , De-Chuan Zhan

Reward models (RMs) play a crucial role in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences and enhancing reasoning quality. Traditionally, RMs are trained to rank candidate outputs based on their correctness and coherence.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Yuhui Xu , Hanze Dong , Lei Wang , Caiming Xiong , Junnan Li

In many real-world applications, the reward function is too complex to be manually specified. In such cases, reward functions must instead be learned from human feedback. Since the learned reward may fail to represent user preferences, it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-28 Erik Jenner , Adam Gleave

The correct specification of reward models is a well-known challenge in reinforcement learning. Hand-crafted reward functions often lead to inefficient or suboptimal policies and may not be aligned with user values. Reinforcement learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Muhan Lin , Shuyang Shi , Yue Guo , Behdad Chalaki , Vaishnav Tadiparthi , Ehsan Moradi Pari , Simon Stepputtis , Joseph Campbell , Katia Sycara

Reward models are central to aligning large language models, yet they often overfit to spurious cues such as response length and overly agreeable tone. Most prior work weakens these cues directly by penalizing or controlling specific…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Yunsheng Lu , Zijiang Yang , Licheng Pan , Zhixuan Chu

Attribution scores indicate the importance of different input parts and can, thus, explain model behaviour. Currently, prompt-based models are gaining popularity, i.a., due to their easier adaptability in low-resource settings. However, the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-11 Wei Zhou , Heike Adel , Hendrik Schuff , Ngoc Thang Vu

Reward Model (RM) has demonstrated impressive potential for enhancing Large Language Models (LLM), as RM can serve as a proxy for human preferences, providing signals to guide LLMs' behavior in various tasks. In this paper, we provide a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-18 Jialun Zhong , Wei Shen , Yanzeng Li , Songyang Gao , Hua Lu , Yicheng Chen , Yang Zhang , Wei Zhou , Jinjie Gu , Lei Zou

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

Learning reward models from human preference datasets and subsequently optimizing language models via reinforcement learning has emerged as a fundamental paradigm for aligning LLMs with human preferences. The performance of the reward model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-12 Wenjie Qiu , Yi-Chen Li , Xuqin Zhang , Tianyi Zhang , Yihang Zhang , Zongzhang Zhang , Yang Yu

Aligning large language models to human preferences is inherently multidimensional, yet most pipelines collapse heterogeneous signals into a single optimizeable objective. We seek to answer what it would take to simultaneously align a model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Yiran Shen , Yu Xia , Jonathan Chang , Prithviraj Ammanabrolu

Reward models play an essential role in training vision-language models (VLMs) by assessing output quality to enable aligning with human preferences. Despite their importance, the research community lacks comprehensive open benchmarks for…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Michihiro Yasunaga , Luke Zettlemoyer , Marjan Ghazvininejad

Value trade-offs are an integral part of human decision-making and language use, however, current tools for interpreting such dynamic and multi-faceted notions of values in language models are limited. In cognitive science, so-called…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Sonia K. Murthy , Rosie Zhao , Jennifer Hu , Sham Kakade , Markus Wulfmeier , Peng Qian , Tomer Ullman

Reward models are key to language model post-training and inference pipelines. Conveniently, recent work showed that every language model defines an implicit reward model (IM-RM), without requiring any architectural changes. However, such…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Noam Razin , Yong Lin , Jiarui Yao , Sanjeev Arora

Reward models (RMs) are essential for aligning large language models (LLM) with human expectations. However, existing RMs struggle to capture the stochastic and uncertain nature of human preferences and fail to assess the reliability of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-13 Xingzhou Lou , Dong Yan , Wei Shen , Yuzi Yan , Jian Xie , Junge Zhang

Aligning large language models (LLMs) to human preferences is challenging in domains where preference data is unavailable. We address the problem of learning reward models for such target domains by leveraging feedback collected from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-03 David Wu , Sanjiban Choudhury

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