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Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) aligns Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences, yet the underlying reward signals they internalize remain hidden, posing a critical challenge for interpretability and safety.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Nyal Patel , Matthieu Bou , Arjun Jagota , Satyapriya Krishna , Sonali Parbhoo

Reward design is a fundamental problem in reinforcement learning (RL). A misspecified or poorly designed reward can result in low sample efficiency and undesired behaviors. In this paper, we propose the idea of programmatic reward design,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-10 Weichao Zhou , Wenchao Li

Adapting the User Interface (UI) of software systems to user requirements and the context of use is challenging. The main difficulty consists of suggesting the right adaptation at the right time in the right place in order to make it…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Daniel Gaspar-Figueiredo , Silvia Abrahão , Marta Fernández-Diego , Emilio Insfran

Reward models (RMs) are inherently non-neutral value functions designed and trained to encode specific objectives, such as human preferences or text-image alignment. RMs have become crucial components of text-to-image (T2I) generation…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Salma Abdel Magid , Grace Guo , Esin Tureci , Amaya Dharmasiri , Vikram V. Ramaswamy , Hanspeter Pfister , Olga Russakovsky

Reinforcement learning (RL), particularly in sparse reward settings, often requires prohibitively large numbers of interactions with the environment, thereby limiting its applicability to complex problems. To address this, several prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-20 Prasoon Goyal , Scott Niekum , Raymond J. Mooney

Learning from human feedback has shown success in aligning large, pretrained models with human values. Prior works have mostly focused on learning from high-level labels, such as preferences between pairs of model outputs. On the other…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Amber Xie , Chin-Yi Cheng , Forrest Huang , Yang Li

We introduce LLaVA-Reward, an efficient reward model designed to automatically evaluate text-to-image (T2I) generations across multiple perspectives, leveraging pretrained multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Existing MLLM-based…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-07-31 Shijie Zhou , Ruiyi Zhang , Huaisheng Zhu , Branislav Kveton , Yufan Zhou , Jiuxiang Gu , Jian Chen , Changyou Chen

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) is a promising approach to solving long-horizon problems with sparse and delayed rewards. Many existing HRL algorithms either use pre-trained low-level skills that are unadaptable, or require…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-11 Siyuan Li , Rui Wang , Minxue Tang , Chongjie Zhang

Reinforcement learning agents are fundamentally limited by the quality of the reward functions they learn from, yet reward design is often overlooked under the assumption that a well-defined reward is readily available. However, in…

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a powerful technique to make large language models (LLMs) easier to use and more effective. A core piece of the RLHF process is the training and utilization of a model of…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2023-11-29 Nathan Lambert , Thomas Krendl Gilbert , Tom Zick

The emergence of reinforcement learning in post-training of large language models has sparked significant interest in reward models. Reward models assess the quality of sampled model outputs to generate training signals. This task is also…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Sebastian Gehrmann

The complexity of designing reward functions has been a major obstacle to the wide application of deep reinforcement learning (RL) techniques. Describing an agent's desired behaviors and properties can be difficult, even for experts. A new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-09 Wanqi Xue , Bo An , Shuicheng Yan , Zhongwen Xu

This work tackles the problem of overoptimization in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), a prevalent technique for aligning models with human preferences. RLHF relies on reward or preference models trained on \emph{fixed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Dhawal Gupta , Adam Fisch , Christoph Dann , Alekh Agarwal

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a central framework for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. Despite its practical success, RLHF raises fundamental statistical questions because it…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-06 Pangpang Liu , Chengchun Shi , Will Wei Sun

Generative foundation models are susceptible to implicit biases that can arise from extensive unsupervised training data. Such biases can produce suboptimal samples, skewed outcomes, and unfairness, with potentially serious consequences.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-04 Hanze Dong , Wei Xiong , Deepanshu Goyal , Yihan Zhang , Winnie Chow , Rui Pan , Shizhe Diao , Jipeng Zhang , Kashun Shum , Tong Zhang

As reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become the dominant paradigm for scaling reasoning capabilities in LLMs, a new failure mode emerges: LLMs gaming verifiers. We study this phenomenon on inductive reasoning tasks,…

In reinforcement learning (RL), value-based algorithms learn to associate each observation with the states and rewards that are likely to be reached from it. We observe that many self-supervised image pre-training methods bear similarity to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-16 Dibya Ghosh , Sergey Levine

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a predominant technique to align language models (LMs) with human preferences or promote outputs which are deemed to be desirable by a given reward function. Standard RL approaches optimize average…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Stephen Zhao , Aidan Li , Rob Brekelmans , Roger Grosse

High-quality training triplets (instruction, original image, edited image) are essential for instruction-based image editing. Predominant training datasets (e.g., InsPix2Pix) are created using text-to-image generative models (e.g., Stable…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Xin Gu , Ming Li , Libo Zhang , Fan Chen , Longyin Wen , Tiejian Luo , Sijie Zhu

Existing alignment methods share a common topology of information flow, where reward information is collected from humans, modeled with preference learning, and used to tune language models. However, this shared topology has not been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Tianyi Qiu , Fanzhi Zeng , Jiaming Ji , Dong Yan , Kaile Wang , Jiayi Zhou , Yang Han , Josef Dai , Xuehai Pan , Yaodong Yang