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Improving the alignment of language models with human preferences remains an active research challenge. Previous approaches have primarily utilized Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) via online RL methods such as Proximal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-25 Tianqi Liu , Yao Zhao , Rishabh Joshi , Misha Khalman , Mohammad Saleh , Peter J. Liu , Jialu Liu

Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), as the widely employed policy based reinforcement learning (RL) methods, are prone to converge to a sub-optimal solution as they limit the policy representation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Jun Song , Chaoyue Zhao

Preference learning is a key technology for aligning language models with human values. Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a model-based algorithm to optimize preference learning, which first fits a reward model for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-26 Zaifan Jiang , Xing Huang , Chao Wei

While large-scale unsupervised language models (LMs) learn broad world knowledge and some reasoning skills, achieving precise control of their behavior is difficult due to the completely unsupervised nature of their training. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-31 Rafael Rafailov , Archit Sharma , Eric Mitchell , Stefano Ermon , Christopher D. Manning , Chelsea Finn

Language models must now generalize out of the box to novel environments and work inside inference-scaling search procedures, such as AlphaEvolve, that select rollouts with a variety of task-specific reward functions. Unfortunately, the…

Aligning large language models with pointwise absolute rewards has so far required online, on-policy algorithms such as PPO and GRPO. In contrast, simpler methods that can leverage offline or off-policy data, such as DPO and REBEL, are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Simon Matrenok , Skander Moalla , Caglar Gulcehre

In this paper, we take a step towards a deeper understanding of learning from human preferences by systematically comparing the paradigm of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) with the recently proposed paradigm of direct…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Andi Nika , Debmalya Mandal , Parameswaran Kamalaruban , Georgios Tzannetos , Goran Radanović , Adish Singla

In the classical Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) framework, Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is employed to learn from sparse, sentence-level rewards -- a challenging scenario in traditional deep reinforcement learning.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Han Zhong , Zikang Shan , Guhao Feng , Wei Xiong , Xinle Cheng , Li Zhao , Di He , Jiang Bian , Liwei Wang

Contemporary reinforcement learning with verifiable reward methods post-train language models on multi-step reasoning by assigning a single outcome reward uniformly across all tokens in a trajectory. Such uniform assignment ignores which…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Ankur Samanta , Akshayaa Magesh , Ayush Jain , Youliang Yu , Daniel Jiang , Kavosh Asadi , Kaveh Hassani , Paul Sajda , Jalaj Bhandari , Yonathan Efroni

We introduce Direct Value Optimization (DVO), an innovative reinforcement learning framework for enhancing large language models in complex reasoning tasks. Unlike traditional methods relying on preference labels, DVO utilizes value signals…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-20 Hongbo Zhang , Han Cui , Guangsheng Bao , Linyi Yang , Jun Wang , Yue Zhang

Traditional RLHF-based LLM alignment methods explicitly maximize the expected rewards from a separate reward model. More recent supervised alignment methods like Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) circumvent this phase to avoid problems…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-03 Abhijnan Nath , Changsoo Jung , Ethan Seefried , Nikhil Krishnaswamy

Large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential in natural language processing tasks, but their application to machine translation (MT) remains challenging due to pretraining on English-centric data and the complexity of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-24 Guofeng Cui , Pichao Wang , Yang Liu , Zemian Ke , Zhu Liu , Vimal Bhat

Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR), especially with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), has shown strong potential for improving the reasoning capabilities of large vision-language models (LVLMs). However, in…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Bingqing Jiang , Difan Zou

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), due to the deterministic verification, becomes a dominant paradigm for enhancing the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs). The community witnesses the rapid change from the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Mingwei Xu , Hao Fang

In this paper, we explore how directly pretraining a value model simplifies and stabilizes reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). In reinforcement learning, value estimation is the key to policy optimization, distinct from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Chenghua Huang , Lu Wang , Fangkai Yang , Pu Zhao , Zhixu Li , Qingwei Lin , Dongmei Zhang , Saravan Rajmohan , Qi Zhang

The dominant framework for alignment of large language models (LLM), whether through reinforcement learning from human feedback or direct preference optimisation, is to learn from preference data. This involves building datasets where each…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated unprecedented generative capabilities, yet their alignment with human values remains critical for ensuring helpful and harmless deployments. While Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback…

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a lightweight and effective alternative to Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and Reinforcement Learning with AI Feedback (RLAIF) for aligning large language and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Zihui Zhao , Zechang Li

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models excel in robotic manipulation but are constrained by their heavy reliance on expert demonstrations, leading to demonstration bias and limiting performance. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a vital…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Senyu Fei , Siyin Wang , Li Ji , Ao Li , Shiduo Zhang , Liming Liu , Jinlong Hou , Jingjing Gong , Xianzhong Zhao , Xipeng Qiu

The effectiveness of Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) depends on preference data that reflect the quality differences that matter in multimodal tasks. Existing pipelines often rely on off-policy perturbations or coarse outcome-based…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Ya-Qi Yu , Fangyu Hong , Xiangyang Qu , Hao Wang , Gaojie Wu , Qiaoyu Luo , Nuo Xu , Huixin Wang , Wuheng Xu , Yongxin Liao , Zihao Chen , Haonan Li , Ziming Li , Dezhi Peng , Minghui Liao , Jihao Wu , Haoyu Ren , Dandan Tu