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Reward models (RMs) guide the alignment of large language models (LLMs), steering them toward behaviors preferred by humans. Evaluating RMs is the key to better aligning LLMs. However, the current evaluation of RMs may not directly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-07 Enyu Zhou , Guodong Zheng , Binghai Wang , Zhiheng Xi , Shihan Dou , Rong Bao , Wei Shen , Limao Xiong , Jessica Fan , Yurong Mou , Rui Zheng , Tao Gui , Qi Zhang , Xuanjing Huang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, yet their transition to real-world applications reveals a critical limitation: the inability to adapt to individual preferences while maintaining alignment with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-06 Jian Guan , Junfei Wu , Jia-Nan Li , Chuanqi Cheng , Wei Wu

Current large language model (LLM) development treats task-solving and preference-alignment as separate challenges, optimizing first for objective correctness, then for alignment to aggregated human preferences. This paradigm fails in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Shuyue Stella Li , Avinandan Bose , Faeze Brahman , Simon Shaolei Du , Pang Wei Koh , Maryam Fazel , Yulia Tsvetkov

Reward models (RMs) are essential for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences to improve interaction quality. However, the real world is pluralistic, which leads to diversified human preferences with respect to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-18 Pengyu Cheng , Jiawen Xie , Ke Bai , Yong Dai , Nan Du

Designing reward functions for continuous-control robotics often leads to subtle misalignments or reward hacking, especially in complex tasks. Preference-based RL mitigates some of these pitfalls by learning rewards from comparative…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Anukriti Singh , Amisha Bhaskar , Peihong Yu , Souradip Chakraborty , Ruthwik Dasyam , Amrit Bedi , Pratap Tokekar

Reward models (RMs) are central to the alignment of language models (LMs). An RM often serves as a proxy for human preferences to guide downstream LM behavior. However, our understanding of RM behavior is limited. Our work (i) formalizes a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-09 Elle

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive capabilities but require careful alignment with human preferences. Traditional training-time methods finetune LLMs using human preference datasets but incur significant training costs and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Yuancheng Xu , Udari Madhushani Sehwag , Alec Koppel , Sicheng Zhu , Bang An , Furong Huang , Sumitra Ganesh

Despite notable advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), most state-of-the-art models have not undergone thorough alignment with human preferences. This gap exists because current alignment research has primarily achieved…

Reward-model-based fine-tuning is a central paradigm in aligning Large Language Models with human preferences. However, such approaches critically rely on the assumption that proxy reward models accurately reflect intended supervision, a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Zixuan Liu , Siavash H. Khajavi , Guangkai Jiang , Xinru Liu

While Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is widely used to align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences, it typically assumes homogeneous preferences across users, overlooking diverse human values and minority…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Yijiang River Dong , Tiancheng Hu , Yinhong Liu , Ahmet Üstün , Nigel Collier

Accurately aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences is crucial for informing fair, economically sound, and statistically efficient decision-making processes. However, we argue that the predominant approach for aligning…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-08-26 Jiancong Xiao , Ziniu Li , Xingyu Xie , Emily Getzen , Cong Fang , Qi Long , Weijie J. Su

Alignment of large language models (LLMs) typically involves training a reward model on preference data, followed by policy optimization with respect to the reward model. However, optimizing policies with respect to a single reward model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-23 Debangshu Banerjee , Kintan Saha , Aditya Gopalan

Preference learning algorithms (e.g., RLHF and DPO) are frequently used to steer LLMs to produce generations that are more preferred by humans, but our understanding of their inner workings is still limited. In this work, we study the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Angelica Chen , Sadhika Malladi , Lily H. Zhang , Xinyi Chen , Qiuyi Zhang , Rajesh Ranganath , Kyunghyun Cho

Reward Models (RMs) are crucial for aligning language models with human preferences. Currently, the evaluation of RMs depends on measuring accuracy against a validation set of manually annotated preference data. Although this method is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-17 Xueru Wen , Jie Lou , Yaojie Lu , Hongyu Lin , Xing Yu , Xinyu Lu , Ben He , Xianpei Han , Debing Zhang , Le Sun

In classical Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), Reward Models (RMs) serve as the fundamental signal provider for model alignment. As Large Language Models evolve into agentic systems capable of autonomous tool invocation and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Jiaxuan Wang , Yulan Hu , Wenjin Yang , Zheng Pan , Xin Li , Lan-Zhe Guo

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

Decision-making agents based on pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being deployed across various domains of human activity. While their applications are currently rather specialized, several research efforts are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Elizaveta Tennant , Stephen Hailes , Mirco Musolesi

Reward models (RMs) play a pivotal role in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values. However, noisy preferences in human feedback can lead to reward misgeneralization - a phenomenon where reward models learn spurious…

Typical LLM responses tend to follow a default style, even though users often have distinct preferences regarding tone, verbosity, and formality that they do not explicitly state in their prompts. Evaluating whether personalization methods…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Philipp Spohn , Leander Girrbach , Zeynep Akata

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as an effective approach to aligning large language models (LLMs) to human preferences. RLHF contains three steps, i.e., human preference collecting, reward learning, and policy…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-29 Hao Lang , Fei Huang , Yongbin Li