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Reinforcement learning provides an automated framework for learning behaviors from high-level reward specifications, but in practice the choice of reward function can be crucial for good results -- while in principle the reward only needs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-19 Abhishek Gupta , Aldo Pacchiano , Yuexiang Zhai , Sham M. Kakade , Sergey Levine

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 reliable reward model is essential for aligning large language models with human preferences through reinforcement learning from human feedback. However, standard reward models are susceptible to spurious features that are not causally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Yupei Yang , Lin Yang , Wanxi Deng , Lin Qu , Fan Feng , Biwei Huang , Shikui Tu , Lei Xu

From a first-principles perspective, it may seem odd that the strongest results in foundation model fine-tuning (FT) are achieved via a relatively complex, two-stage training procedure. Specifically, one first trains a reward model (RM) on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Gokul Swamy , Sanjiban Choudhury , Wen Sun , Zhiwei Steven Wu , J. Andrew Bagnell

A safe and trustworthy use of Large Language Models (LLMs) requires an accurate expression of confidence in their answers. We propose a novel Reinforcement Learning approach that allows to directly fine-tune LLMs to express calibrated…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 David Bani-Harouni , Chantal Pellegrini , Paul Stangel , Ege Özsoy , Kamilia Zaripova , Nassir Navab , Matthias Keicher

Reward functions are central in reinforcement learning (RL), guiding agents towards optimal decision-making. The complexity of RL tasks requires meticulously designed reward functions that effectively drive learning while avoiding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-31 Rati Devidze

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has become a popular approach to align language models (LMs) with human preferences. This method involves collecting a large dataset of human pairwise preferences across various text…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Antoine Scheid , Etienne Boursier , Alain Durmus , Michael I. Jordan , Pierre Ménard , Eric Moulines , Michal Valko

Modern large language models (LLMs) are optimized for human-aligned responses using Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). However, existing RLHF approaches assume a universal preference model and fail to account for individual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Idan Shenfeld , Felix Faltings , Pulkit Agrawal , Aldo Pacchiano

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a standard paradigm for refining large language models (LLMs) beyond pre-training and instruction tuning. A prominent line of work is RL with verifiable rewards (RLVR), which leverages automatically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Bonan Zhang , Zhongqi Chen , Bowen Song , Qinya Li , Fan Wu , Guihai Chen

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate transformative potential, yet their reasoning remains inconsistent and unreliable. Reinforcement learning (RL)-based fine-tuning is a key mechanism for improvement, but its effectiveness is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Pei-Chi Pan , Yingbin Liang , Sen Lin

Reward design remains a significant bottleneck in applying reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world problems. A popular alternative is reward learning, where reward functions are inferred from human feedback rather than manually specified.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Chaitanya Kharyal , Calarina Muslimani , Matthew E. Taylor

Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods have emerged as a popular choice for training an efficient and effective dialogue policy. However, these methods suffer from sparse and unstable reward signals returned by a user simulator only when a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-09-18 Ziming Li , Sungjin Lee , Baolin Peng , Jinchao Li , Julia Kiseleva , Maarten de Rijke , Shahin Shayandeh , Jianfeng Gao

Single-task RL agents are typically trained under a fixed reward function, which limits their robustness to reward misspecification and their ability to adapt to changing preferences. We introduce Reward-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Michal Nauman , Marek Cygan , Pieter Abbeel

We study reinforcement learning (RL) for decision processes with non-Markovian reward, in which high-level knowledge of the task in the form of reward machines is available to the learner. We consider probabilistic reward machines with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Hippolyte Bourel , Anders Jonsson , Odalric-Ambrym Maillard , Chenxiao Ma , Mohammad Sadegh Talebi

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is commonly employed to tailor models to human preferences, especially to improve the safety of outputs from large language models (LLMs). Traditionally, this method depends on selecting…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-29 Xiaomin Li , Mingye Gao , Zhiwei Zhang , Jingxuan Fan , Weiyu Li

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is an effective tool for real-world recommender systems with its capacity to model the dynamic interest of users and its interactive nature. Most existing offline RL recommender systems focus on…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Yi Zhang , Ruihong Qiu , Jiajun Liu , Sen Wang

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

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) provides a powerful paradigm to avoid meticulous reward engineering by learning rewards based on human preferences. However, real-time human feedback is hard to obtain in online tasks. Most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Songjun Tu , Jingbo Sun , Qichao Zhang , Xiangyuan Lan , Dongbin Zhao

Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated strong potential in training large language models (LLMs) capable of complex reasoning for real-world problem solving. More recently, RL has been leveraged to create sophisticated LLM-based…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Bowen Jin , Jinsung Yoon , Priyanka Kargupta , Sercan O. Arik , Jiawei Han

Learning rewards from preference feedback has become an important tool in the alignment of agentic models. Preference-based feedback, often implemented as a binary comparison between multiple completions, is an established method to acquire…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Yannick Metz , András Geiszl , Raphaël Baur , Mennatallah El-Assady