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Reinforcement learning (RL) is increasingly used to personalize instruction in intelligent tutoring systems, yet the field lacks a formal framework for defining and evaluating pedagogical safety. We introduce a four-layer model of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Oluseyi Olukola , Nick Rahimi

Reward design is central to reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and alignment research. In this work, we propose a unified framework to study hard, continuous, and hybrid reward structures for fine-tuning large language models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Subramanyam Sahoo

Recent advances in diffusion language models (DLMs) have presented a promising alternative to traditional autoregressive large language models (LLMs). However, DLMs still lag behind LLMs in reasoning performance, especially as the number of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Chenglong Wang , Yang Gan , Hang Zhou , Chi Hu , Yongyu Mu , Kai Song , Murun Yang , Bei Li , Chunliang Zhang , Tongran Liu , Jingbo Zhu , Zhengtao Yu , Tong Xiao

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing, yet aligning these models with human values and preferences using RLHF remains a significant challenge. This challenge is characterized by various instabilities,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-20 Baolin Peng , Linfeng Song , Ye Tian , Lifeng Jin , Haitao Mi , Dong Yu

Despite recent progress, reinforcement learning (RL)-based fine-tuning of diffusion models often struggles with generalization, composability, and robustness against reward hacking. Recent studies have explored prompt refinement as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Suhyeon Lee , Jong Chul Ye

Large language model (LLM) agents learn by interacting with environments, but long-horizon training remains fundamentally bottlenecked by sparse and delayed rewards. Existing methods typically address this challenge through post-hoc credit…

This paper proposes a new reinforcement learning with hyperbolic discounting. Combining a new temporal difference error with the hyperbolic discounting in recursive manner and reward-punishment framework, a new scheme to learn the optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-04 Taisuke Kobayashi

Reward hacking, where a reasoning model exploits loopholes in a reward function to achieve high rewards without solving the intended task, poses a significant threat. This behavior may be explicit, i.e. verbalized in the model's…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Xinpeng Wang , Nitish Joshi , Barbara Plank , Rico Angell , He He

Human reasoning is shaped by resource rationality -- optimizing performance under constraints. Recently, inference-time scaling has emerged as a powerful paradigm to improve the reasoning performance of Large Language Models by expanding…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Zhimin Hu , Riya Roshan , Sashank Varma

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive performance but lack the flexibility to adapt to human preferences quickly without retraining. In this work, we introduce Test-time Preference Optimization (TPO), a framework that aligns…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-23 Yafu Li , Xuyang Hu , Xiaoye Qu , Linjie Li , Yu Cheng

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

We introduce Robust Multi-Objective Decoding (RMOD), a novel inference-time algorithm that robustly aligns Large Language Models (LLMs) to multiple human objectives (e.g., instruction-following, helpfulness, safety) by maximizing the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Seongho Son , William Bankes , Sangwoong Yoon , Shyam Sundhar Ramesh , Xiaohang Tang , Ilija Bogunovic

Test-time scaling enhances large language model performance by allocating additional compute resources during inference. Best-of-N (BoN) sampling serves as a common sampling-based scaling technique, broadening the search space in parallel…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Yiming Wang , Pei Zhang , Siyuan Huang , Baosong Yang , Zhuosheng Zhang , Fei Huang , Rui Wang

Empirical researchers and decision-makers spanning various domains frequently seek profound insights into the long-term impacts of interventions. While the significance of long-term outcomes is undeniable, an overemphasis on them may…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-17 Peng Wu , Ziyu Shen , Feng Xie , Zhongyao Wang , Chunchen Liu , Yan Zeng

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as an effective approach to aligning large language models (LLMs) to human preferences. RLHF contains three steps, i.e., human preference collecting, reward learning, and policy…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-29 Hao Lang , Fei Huang , Yongbin Li

Previous methods evaluate reward models by testing them on a fixed pairwise ranking test set, but they typically do not provide performance information on each preference dimension. In this work, we address the evaluation challenge of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Chenglong Wang , Yifu Huo , Yang Gan , Yongyu Mu , Qiaozhi He , Murun Yang , Bei Li , Chunliang Zhang , Tongran Liu , Anxiang Ma , Zhengtao Yu , Jingbo Zhu , Tong Xiao

Reward models (RMs) play a crucial role in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), aligning model behavior with human preferences. However, existing benchmarks for reward models show a weak correlation with the performance of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Sunghwan Kim , Dongjin Kang , Taeyoon Kwon , Hyungjoo Chae , Dongha Lee , Jinyoung Yeo

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a widely adopted approach for aligning large language models with human values. However, RLHF relies on a reward model that is trained with a limited amount of human preference data,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Shun Zhang , Zhenfang Chen , Sunli Chen , Yikang Shen , Zhiqing Sun , Chuang Gan

Ensuring AI models align with human values is essential for their safety and functionality. Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) leverages human preferences to achieve this alignment. However, when preferences are sourced from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Ryan Bahlous-Boldi , Li Ding , Lee Spector , Scott Niekum

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a widely used framework for the training of language models. However, the process of using RLHF to develop a language model that is well-aligned presents challenges, especially when it…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-09 Bowen Qin , Duanyu Feng , Xi Yang