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Large language models (LLMs) trained with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, but their underlying reward functions and decision-making processes remain opaque. This paper introduces…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Jared Joselowitz , Ritam Majumdar , Arjun Jagota , Matthieu Bou , Nyal Patel , Satyapriya Krishna , Sonali Parbhoo

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences through reinforcement learning (RLHF) can lead to reward hacking, where LLMs exploit failures in the reward model (RM) to achieve seemingly high rewards without meeting the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-23 Alexandre Ramé , Nino Vieillard , Léonard Hussenot , Robert Dadashi , Geoffrey Cideron , Olivier Bachem , Johan Ferret

We introduce a method to address goal misgeneralization in reinforcement learning (RL), leveraging Large Language Model (LLM) feedback during training. Goal misgeneralization, a type of robustness failure in RL occurs when an agent retains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Houda Nait El Barj , Theophile Sautory

Reward modelling from preference data is a crucial step in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values, requiring robust generalisation to novel prompt-response pairs. In this work, we propose to frame this problem in a causal…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Katarzyna Kobalczyk , Mihaela van der Schaar

Reinforcement learning from human feedback usually models preferences using a reward function that does not distinguish between people. We argue that this is unlikely to be a good design choice in contexts with high potential for…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are prone to hallucination, especially during multi-hop and reasoning-intensive tasks such as mathematical problem solving. While Outcome Reward Models verify only final answers, Process Reward Models (PRMs)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Tej Deep Pala , Panshul Sharma , Amir Zadeh , Chuan Li , Soujanya Poria

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated a superior ability to serve as ranking models. However, concerns have arisen as LLMs will exhibit discriminatory ranking behaviors based on users' sensitive attributes (\eg gender).…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-09-26 Chen Xu , Wenjie Wang , Yuxin Li , Liang Pang , Jun Xu , Tat-Seng Chua

Natural and formal languages provide an effective mechanism for humans to specify instructions and reward functions. We investigate how to generate policies via RL when reward functions are specified in a symbolic language captured by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-24 Andrew C. Li , Zizhao Chen , Pashootan Vaezipoor , Toryn Q. Klassen , Rodrigo Toro Icarte , Sheila A. McIlraith

Learning to plan in grounded environments typically requires carefully designed reward functions or high-quality annotated demonstrations. Recent works show that pretrained foundation models, such as large language models (LLMs) and vision…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-15 Yuxuan Li , Victor Zhong

The rapid rise of Language Models (LMs) has expanded the capabilities of natural language processing, powering applications from text generation to complex decision-making. While state-of-the-art LMs often boast hundreds of billions of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-24 Maximilian Abstreiter , Sasu Tarkoma , Roberto Morabito

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

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has been a main driver of recent breakthroughs in large reasoning models. Yet it remains a mystery how rewards based solely on final outcomes can help overcome the long-horizon barrier…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Yu Huang , Zixin Wen , Yuejie Chi , Yuting Wei , Aarti Singh , Yingbin Liang , Yuxin Chen

Recent self-rewarding large language models (LLM) have successfully applied LLM-as-a-Judge to iteratively improve the alignment performance without the need of human annotations for preference data. These methods commonly utilize the same…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Zhaoyang Wang , Weilei He , Zhiyuan Liang , Xuchao Zhang , Chetan Bansal , Ying Wei , Weitong Zhang , Huaxiu Yao

Reward models (RM) capture the values and preferences of humans and play a central role in Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) to align pretrained large language models (LLMs). Traditionally, training these models relies on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-12 Yifei He , Haoxiang Wang , Ziyan Jiang , Alexandros Papangelis , Han Zhao

A central belief in scaling reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards for instruction following (IF) tasks is that, a diverse mixture of verifiable hard and unverifiable soft constraints is essential for generalizing to unseen…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Yirong Zeng , Yufei Liu , Xiao Ding , Yutai Hou , Yuxian Wang , Haonan Song , Wu Ning , Dandan Tu , Qixun Zhang , Bibo Cai , Yuxiang He , Ting Liu

Generative Reward Models (GRMs) have demonstrated strong performance in reward modeling, due to their interpretability and potential for refinement through reinforcement learning (RL). However, widely used pairwise GRMs create a…

Implicit bias describes the phenomenon where optimization-based training algorithms, without explicit regularization, show a preference for simple estimators even when more complex estimators have equal objective values. Multiple works have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-08 Hrithik Ravi , Clayton Scott , Daniel Soudry , Yutong Wang

In-context learning enables large language models (LLMs) to perform a variety of tasks, including learning to make reward-maximizing choices in simple bandit tasks. Given their potential use as (autonomous) decision-making agents, it is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-21 William M. Hayes , Nicolas Yax , Stefano Palminteri

The handling of probabilities in the form of uncertainty or partial information is an essential task for LLMs in many settings and applications. A common approach to evaluate an LLM's probabilistic reasoning capabilities is to assess its…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Manuel Mondal , Ljiljana Dolamic , Gérôme Bovet , Philippe Cudré-Mauroux , Julien Audiffren

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