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Related papers: The Alignment Bottleneck

200 papers

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

With the rise of large language models (LLMs), ensuring they embody the principles of being helpful, honest, and harmless (3H), known as Human Alignment, becomes crucial. While existing alignment methods like RLHF, DPO, etc., effectively…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Shu Yang , Jiayuan Su , Han Jiang , Mengdi Li , Keyuan Cheng , Muhammad Asif Ali , Lijie Hu , Di Wang

Recent studies show that deep vision-only and language-only models--trained on disjoint modalities--nonetheless project their inputs into a partially aligned representational space. Yet we still lack a clear picture of where in each network…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Zoe Wanying He , Sean Trott , Meenakshi Khosla

"LLM-as-a-judge," which utilizes large language models (LLMs) as evaluators, has proven effective in many evaluation tasks. However, evaluator LLMs exhibit numerical bias, a phenomenon where certain evaluation scores are generated…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Ayako Sato , Hwichan Kim , Zhousi Chen , Masato Mita , Mamoru Komachi

We introduce Learning-Augmented Control (LAC), an approach that integrates untrusted machine learning predictions into the control of constrained, nonlinear dynamical systems. LAC is designed to achieve the "best-of-both-worlds" guarantees,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-07-22 Tongxin Li

As agents based on large language models are increasingly deployed to long-horizon tasks, maintaining their alignment with stakeholder preferences becomes critical. Effective alignment in such settings requires reward models that are…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Charlie Masters , Marta Grześkiewicz , Stefano V. Albrecht

Alignment is a crucial step to enhance the instruction-following and conversational abilities of language models. Despite many recent work proposing new algorithms, datasets, and training pipelines, there is a lack of comprehensive studies…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-04 Xiao Yu , Qingyang Wu , Yu Li , Zhou Yu

Aligning large language models (LLMs) to human preferences is a crucial step in building helpful and safe AI tools, which usually involve training on supervised datasets. Popular algorithms such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) rely…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Honggen Zhang , Xufeng Zhao , Igor Molybog , June Zhang

Frontier LLMs are optimised around high-resource assumptions about language, knowledge, devices, and connectivity. Whilst widely accessible, they often misfit conditions in the Global South. As a result, users must often perform additional…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Cumi Oyemike , Elizabeth Akpan , Pierre Hervé-Berdys

Large Language Models are cognitively biased judges. Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently been shown to be effective as automatic evaluators with simple prompting and in-context learning. In this work, we assemble 15 LLMs of four…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-26 Ryan Koo , Minhwa Lee , Vipul Raheja , Jong Inn Park , Zae Myung Kim , Dongyeop Kang

We propose a stylized model of human-AI collaboration that isolates a mechanism we call the novelty bottleneck: the fraction of a task requiring human judgment creates an irreducible serial component analogous to Amdahl's Law in parallel…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Jacky Liang

Large Language Models (LLMs) aligned using Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) have shown remarkable generation abilities in numerous tasks. However, collecting high-quality human preferences creates costly bottlenecks in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Nirjhar Das , Souradip Chakraborty , Aldo Pacchiano , Sayak Ray Chowdhury

Reasoning benchmarks such as the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC) and ARC-AGI are widely used to assess progress in artificial intelligence and are often interpreted as probes of core, so-called ``fluid'' reasoning abilities. Despite…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-12 Xinhe Wang , Jin Huang , Xingjian Zhang , Tianhao Wang , Jiaqi W. Ma

Code-mixing is increasingly prevalent in interactions between humans and large language models, yet existing work often reduces it to a translation or convertibility problem, making it difficult to assess whether a model's switching…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-26 Qingyan Yang , Tongxi Wang , Yunsheng Luo

Vibe coding produces correct, executable code at speed, but leaves no record of the structural commitments, dependencies, or evidence behind it. Reviewers cannot determine what invariants were assumed, what changed, or why a regression…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Tianfu Wang , Zhezheng Hao , Yin Wu , Wei Wu , Qiang Lin , Hande Dong , Nicholas Jing Yuan , Hui Xiong

Sycophancy (overly agreeable or flattering behavior) poses a fundamental challenge for human-AI collaboration, particularly in high-stakes decision-making domains such as health, law, and education. A central difficulty in studying…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Katherine Atwell , Pedram Heydari , Anthony Sicilia , Malihe Alikhani

We propose a novel preference alignment framework for improving spoken dialogue models on real-time conversations from user interactions. Current preference learning methods primarily focus on text-based language models, and are not…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-27 Anne Wu , Laurent Mazaré , Neil Zeghidour , Alexandre Défossez

Feedback alignment and related weight-transport-free algorithms are often proposed as biologically plausible alternatives to backpropagation, yet they are typically formulated in discrete phases with implicitly synchronized forward and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Marc Gong Bacvanski , Liu Ziyin , Tomaso Poggio

Tasks that require information about the world imply a trade-off between the time spent on observation and the variance of the response. In particular, fast decisions need to rely on uncertain information. However, standard estimates of…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2023-07-18 Sahel Azizpour , Viola Priesemann , Johannes Zierenberg , Anna Levina

Despite the importance of aligning language models with human preferences, crowd-sourced human feedback is often noisy -- for example, preferring less desirable responses -- posing a fundamental challenge to alignment. A truly robust…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Masahiro Fujisawa , Masaki Adachi , Michael A. Osborne