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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

Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by using a smaller model to draft future tokens, which are then verified by the target LLM. This preserves generation quality by accepting only aligned tokens.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Taehyeon Kim , Hojung Jung , Se-Young Yun

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a pivotal technique for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences, yet it is susceptible to reward overoptimization, in which policy models overfit to the reward model,…

Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates large language model (LLM) reasoning by using a small draft model to generate candidate tokens, which the target LLM either accepts directly or regenerates upon rejection. However, excessive alignment…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Tiancheng Su , Meicong Zhang , Guoxiu He

Despite extensive efforts to align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human values and safety rules, jailbreak attacks that exploit certain vulnerabilities continuously emerge, highlighting the need to strengthen existing LLMs with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Xuekang Wang , Shengyu Zhu , Xueqi Cheng

Speculative Decoding (SD) is a key technique for accelerating Large Language Model (LLM) inference, but it typically requires training a draft model on a large dataset. We approach this problem from a data-centric perspective, finding that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Jiaming Fan , Daming Cao , Xiangzhong Luo , Jiale Fu , Chonghan Liu , Xu Yang

Sampling algorithms drive probabilistic machine learning, and recent years have seen an explosion in the diversity of tools for this task. However, the increasing sophistication of sampling algorithms is correlated with an increase in the…

Computation · Statistics 2025-07-02 Congye Wang , Matthew A. Fisher , Heishiro Kanagawa , Wilson Chen , Chris. J. Oates

Speculative Decoding has emerged as a popular technique for accelerating inference in Large Language Models. However, most existing approaches yield only modest improvements in production serving systems. Methods that achieve substantial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Michele Marzollo , Jiawei Zhuang , Niklas Roemer , Niklas Zwingenberger , Lorenz K. Müller , Lukas Cavigelli

A key challenge in training Large Language Models (LLMs) is properly aligning them with human preferences. Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) uses pairwise comparisons from human annotators to train reward functions and has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-17 Ariel D. Procaccia , Benjamin Schiffer , Shirley Zhang

While large language models demonstrate remarkable capabilities, they often present challenges in terms of safety, alignment with human values, and stability during training. Here, we focus on two prevalent methods used to align these…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-26 Gabriel Mukobi , Peter Chatain , Su Fong , Robert Windesheim , Gitta Kutyniok , Kush Bhatia , Silas Alberti

Speculative decoding is a pivotal technique to accelerate the inference of large language models (LLMs) by employing a smaller draft model to predict the target model's outputs. However, its efficacy can be limited due to the low predictive…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Xiaoxuan Liu , Lanxiang Hu , Peter Bailis , Alvin Cheung , Zhijie Deng , Ion Stoica , Hao Zhang

Speculative decoding (SD) has emerged as an effective technique to accelerate large language model (LLM) inference without compromising output quality. However, the achievable speedup largely depends on the effectiveness of the drafting…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Min Fang , Zhihui Fu , Qibin Zhao , Jun Wang

Inference-time alignment techniques offer a lightweight alternative or complement to costly reinforcement learning, while enabling continual adaptation as alignment objectives and reward targets evolve. Existing theoretical analyses justify…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Ye Wang , Jing Liu , Toshiaki Koike-Akino

Accelerating the inference of large language models (LLMs) is a critical challenge in generative AI. Speculative decoding (SD) methods offer substantial efficiency gains by generating multiple tokens using a single target forward pass.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-12 Nadav Timor , Jonathan Mamou , Daniel Korat , Moshe Berchansky , Gaurav Jain , Oren Pereg , Moshe Wasserblat , David Harel

Large language models~(LLMs) exhibit exceptional performance in language tasks, yet their auto-regressive inference is limited due to high computational requirements and is sub-optimal due to the exposure bias. Inspired by speculative…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-14 Hongyi Yuan , Keming Lu , Fei Huang , Zheng Yuan , Chang Zhou

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

Speculative sampling (SpS) has been successful in accelerating the decoding throughput of auto-regressive large language models by leveraging smaller draft models. SpS strictly enforces the generated distribution to match that of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Yongchang Hao , Lili Mou

Speculative Decoding is a widely used technique to speed up inference for Large Language Models (LLMs) without sacrificing quality. When performing inference, speculative decoding uses a smaller draft model to generate speculative tokens…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-06 Minghao Yan , Saurabh Agarwal , Shivaram Venkataraman

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a widely used technique for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences, yet it often suffers from sparse reward signals, making effective credit assignment challenging.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Meng Cao , Shuyuan Zhang , Xiao-Wen Chang , Doina Precup

Foundation models, specifically Large Language Models (LLMs), have lately gained wide-spread attention and adoption. Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) involves training a reward model to capture desired behaviors, which is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-25 Will LeVine , Benjamin Pikus , Anthony Chen , Sean Hendryx