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In this work, we address the problem of determining reliable policies in reinforcement learning (RL), with a focus on optimization under uncertainty and the need for performance guarantees. While classical RL algorithms aim at maximizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Nadir Farhi

Large language models~(LLMs) are expected to be helpful, harmless, and honest. In different alignment scenarios, such as safety, confidence, and general preference alignment, binary preference data collection and reward modeling are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Shuai Zhao , Yunqiu Xu , Linchao Zhu , Yi Yang

Reward models (RMs) play a pivotal role in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, traditional RM training, which relies on response pairs tied to specific prompts, struggles to disentangle prompt-driven…

Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) provides a way to learn high-performance policies in environments where the reward signal is hard to specify, avoiding heuristic and time-consuming reward design. However, PbRL can suffer from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-02 Chenyang Cao , Miguel Rogel-García , Mohamed Nabail , Xueqian Wang , Nicholas Rhinehart

Prompting has shown impressive success in enabling large pretrained language models (LMs) to perform diverse NLP tasks, especially when only few downstream data are available. Automatically finding the optimal prompt for each task, however,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Mingkai Deng , Jianyu Wang , Cheng-Ping Hsieh , Yihan Wang , Han Guo , Tianmin Shu , Meng Song , Eric P. Xing , Zhiting Hu

Reinforcement learning (RL) is increasingly used to align large language models (LLMs). Off-policy methods offer greater implementation simplicity and data efficiency than on-policy techniques, but often result in suboptimal performance. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Charles Arnal , Gaëtan Narozniak , Vivien Cabannes , Yunhao Tang , Julia Kempe , Remi Munos

Reinforcement learning (RL) is frequently employed in fine-tuning large language models (LMs), such as GPT-3, to penalize them for undesirable features of generated sequences, such as offensiveness, social bias, harmfulness or falsehood.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-24 Tomasz Korbak , Ethan Perez , Christopher L Buckley

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for aligning large language models (LLMs) knowledge with sequential decision-making tasks. However, few studies have thoroughly investigated the impact on LLM agents capabilities of…

The majority of language model training builds on imitation learning. It covers pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, and affects the starting conditions for reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). The simplicity and scalability…

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has become a crucial technology for aligning language models with human values and intentions, enabling models to produce more helpful and harmless responses. Reward models are trained as…

To design rewards that align with human goals, Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a prominent technique for learning reward functions from human preferences and optimizing policies via reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Taehyun Cho , Seokhun Ju , Seungyub Han , Dohyeong Kim , Kyungjae Lee , Jungwoo Lee

While astonishingly capable, large Language Models (LLM) can sometimes produce outputs that deviate from human expectations. Such deviations necessitate an alignment phase to prevent disseminating untruthful, toxic, or biased information.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-30 Long Tan Le , Han Shu , Tung-Anh Nguyen , Choong Seon Hong , Nguyen H. Tran

While originally developed for continuous control problems, Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has emerged as the work-horse of a variety of reinforcement learning (RL) applications, including the fine-tuning of generative models.…

Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) is a paradigm in which an RL agent learns to optimize a task using pair-wise preference-based feedback over trajectories, rather than explicit reward signals. While PbRL has demonstrated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-18 Wenhao Zhan , Masatoshi Uehara , Wen Sun , Jason D. Lee

Prior work has proposed a simple strategy for reinforcement learning (RL): label experience with the outcomes achieved in that experience, and then imitate the relabeled experience. These outcome-conditioned imitation learning methods are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-21 Benjamin Eysenbach , Soumith Udatha , Sergey Levine , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

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

Alignment is vital for safely deploying large language models (LLMs). Existing techniques are either reward-based (training a reward model on preference pairs and optimizing with reinforcement learning) or reward-free (directly fine-tuning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Ruoxi Cheng , Haoxuan Ma , Weixin Wang , Ranjie Duan , Jiexi Liu , Xiaoshuang Jia , Simeng Qin , Xiaochun Cao , Yang Liu , Xiaojun Jia

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms assume that users specify tasks by manually writing down a reward function. However, this process can be laborious and demands considerable technical expertise. Can we devise RL algorithms that instead…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Benjamin Eysenbach , Sergey Levine , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

Likelihood training and maximization-based decoding result in dull and repetitive generated texts even when using powerful language models (Holtzman et al., 2019). Adding a loss function for regularization was shown to improve text…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-01-13 Evgeny Lagutin , Daniil Gavrilov , Pavel Kalaidin

Reward models have become a staple in modern NLP, serving as not only a scalable text evaluator, but also an indispensable component in many alignment recipes and inference-time algorithms. However, while recent reward models increase…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Zhaofeng Wu , Michihiro Yasunaga , Andrew Cohen , Yoon Kim , Asli Celikyilmaz , Marjan Ghazvininejad