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Black-box optimization (BBO) addresses problems where objectives are accessible only through costly queries without gradients or explicit structure. Classical derivative-free methods -- line search, direct search, and model-based solvers…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Morteza Kimiaei , Vyacheslav Kungurtsev

Designing effective reward functions is crucial to training reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. However, this design is non-trivial, even for domain experts, due to the subjective nature of certain tasks that are hard to quantify…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Rishi Hazra , Alkis Sygkounas , Andreas Persson , Amy Loutfi , Pedro Zuidberg Dos Martires

Tackling complex optimization problems often relies on expert-designed heuristics, typically crafted through extensive trial and error. Recent advances demonstrate that large language models (LLMs), when integrated into well-designed…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Ziyao Huang , Weiwei Wu , Kui Wu , Jianping Wang , Wei-Bin Lee

With the rapid advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), aligning LLMs with human preferences become increasingly important. Although Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) proves effective, it is complicated and highly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Shiqi Wang , Zhengze Zhang , Rui Zhao , Fei Tan , Cam Tu Nguyen

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in reasoning with the emergence of reasoning models like OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1. Recent research focuses on integrating reasoning capabilities into the realm of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Qi Zhang , Shouqing Yang , Lirong Gao , Hao Chen , Xiaomeng Hu , Jinglei Chen , Jiexiang Wang , Sheng Guo , Bo Zheng , Haobo Wang , Junbo Zhao

The process of meta-learning algorithms from data, instead of relying on manual design, is growing in popularity as a paradigm for improving the performance of machine learning systems. Meta-learning shows particular promise for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-11 Alexander David Goldie , Zilin Wang , Jaron Cohen , Jakob Nicolaus Foerster , Shimon Whiteson

Reward models (RMs) have become essential for aligning large language models (LLMs), serving as scalable proxies for human evaluation in both training and inference. However, existing RMs struggle on knowledge-intensive and long-form tasks,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-30 Ziyou Hu , Zhengliang Shi , Minghang Zhu , Haitao Li , Teng Sun , Pengjie Ren , Suzan Verberne , Zhaochun Ren

Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly surpassing human knowledge in many domains. While improving these models traditionally relies on costly human data, recent self-rewarding mechanisms (Yuan et al., 2024) have shown that LLMs can…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-31 Tianhao Wu , Weizhe Yuan , Olga Golovneva , Jing Xu , Yuandong Tian , Jiantao Jiao , Jason Weston , Sainbayar Sukhbaatar

Large language model (LLM) alignment relies on complex reward signals that often obscure the specific behaviors being incentivized, creating critical risks of misalignment and reward hacking. Existing interpretation methods typically rely…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Edward Chen , Sanmi Koyejo , Carlos Guestrin

Current Large Language Models (LLMs) often undergo supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to acquire tool use capabilities. However, SFT struggles to generalize to unfamiliar or complex tool use scenarios. Recent advancements in reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Cheng Qian , Emre Can Acikgoz , Qi He , Hongru Wang , Xiusi Chen , Dilek Hakkani-Tür , Gokhan Tur , Heng Ji

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to automate feature engineering in tabular learning. Given task-specific information, LLMs can propose diverse feature transformation operations to enhance downstream model performance.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Zhuoyan Li , Aditya Bansal , Jinzhao Li , Shishuang He , Zhuoran Lu , Mutian Zhang , Qin Liu , Yiwei Yang , Swati Jain , Ming Yin , Yunyao Li

Group-Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has emerged as an efficient paradigm for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs), yet its efficacy is primarily confined to domains with verifiable ground truths. Extending GRPO to open-domain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Yang Zhao , Hepeng Wang , Xiao Ding , Yangou Ouyang , Bibo Cai , Kai Xiong , Jinglong Gao , Zhouhao Sun , Li Du , Bing Qin , Ting Liu

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has recently enhanced the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), particularly for mathematical problem solving. However, a fundamental limitation remains: as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Wenhao Deng , Long Wei , Chenglei Yu , Tailin Wu

Recent advances in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) for Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning have been hindered by a persistent challenge: exploration collapse. The semantic homogeneity of random rollouts often traps…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-12 Huilin Deng , Hongchen Luo , Yue Zhu , Long Li , Zhuoyue Chen , Xinghao Zhao , Ming Li , Jihai Zhang , Mengchang Wang , Yang Cao , Yu Kang

Preference optimization, particularly through Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), has achieved significant success in aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) to adhere to human intentions. Unlike offline alignment with a fixed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-06 Shenao Zhang , Donghan Yu , Hiteshi Sharma , Han Zhong , Zhihan Liu , Ziyi Yang , Shuohang Wang , Hany Hassan , Zhaoran Wang

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a powerful approach for optimizing complex and expensive-to-evaluate black-box functions. Its importance is underscored in many applications, notably including hyperparameter tuning, but its efficacy depends on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-11 Tennison Liu , Nicolás Astorga , Nabeel Seedat , Mihaela van der Schaar

Reward models are central to large language model (LLM) post-training. However, past work has shown that they can reward spurious or undesirable attributes such as length, format, hallucinations, and sycophancy. In this work, we introduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Atticus Wang , Iván Arcuschin , Arthur Conmy

Aligning multimodal large language models (MLLMs) with human preferences often relies on single-signal, model-based reward methods. Such monolithic rewards often lack confidence calibration across domain-specific tasks, fail to capture…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Radha Gulhane , Sathish Reddy Indurthi

Learning reward functions remains the bottleneck to equip a robot with a broad repertoire of skills. Large Language Models (LLM) contain valuable task-related knowledge that can potentially aid in the learning of reward functions. However,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-05-17 Yuwei Zeng , Yao Mu , Lin Shao

The development of autonomous agents for complex, long-horizon tasks is a central goal in AI. However, dominant training paradigms face a critical limitation: reinforcement learning (RL) methods that optimize solely for final task success…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-31 Zijing Zhang , Ziyang Chen , Mingxiao Li , Zhaopeng Tu , Xiaolong Li