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Related papers: Sparse Reward Subsystem in Large Language Models

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Reward Models (RMs) are crucial for online alignment of language models (LMs) with human preferences. However, RM-based preference-tuning is vulnerable to reward hacking, whereby LM policies learn undesirable behaviors from flawed RMs. By…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Daniel Fein , Max Lamparth , Violet Xiang , Mykel J. Kochenderfer , Nick Haber

Deep feed-forward convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have become ubiquitous in virtually all machine learning and computer vision challenges; however, advancements in CNNs have arguably reached an engineering saturation point where…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2018-06-14 Edward Kim , Darryl Hannan , Garrett Kenyon

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

In reinforcement learning (RL), agents continually interact with the environment and use the feedback to refine their behavior. To guide policy optimization, reward models are introduced as proxies of the desired objectives, such that when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Rui Yu , Shenghua Wan , Yucen Wang , Chen-Xiao Gao , Le Gan , Zongzhang Zhang , De-Chuan Zhan

Reinforcement learning (RL) has a rich history in neuroscience, from early work on dopamine as a reward prediction error signal (Schultz et al., 1997) to recent work proposing that the brain could implement a form of 'distributional…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2024-12-19 Kristopher T. Jensen

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is a promising approach for teaching robots new behaviour. However, one of its main limitations is the need for carefully hand-coded reward signals by an expert. We argue that it is crucial to automate the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-08-09 Abdalkarim Mohtasib , Gerhard Neumann , Heriberto Cuayahuitl

Although reward models have been successful in improving multimodal large language models, the reward models themselves remain brutal and contain minimal information. Notably, existing reward models only mimic human annotations by assigning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Deqing Fu , Tong Xiao , Rui Wang , Wang Zhu , Pengchuan Zhang , Guan Pang , Robin Jia , Lawrence Chen

Recent studies on post-training large language models (LLMs) for reasoning through reinforcement learning (RL) typically focus on tasks that can be accurately verified and rewarded, such as solving math problems. In contrast, our research…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Ang Lv , Ruobing Xie , Xingwu Sun , Zhanhui Kang , Rui Yan

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…

In the Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework, the learning is guided through a reward signal. This means that in situations of sparse rewards the agent has to focus on exploration, in order to discover which action, or set of actions leads…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-03 Giuseppe Paolo

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

Large language models can express values in two main ways: (1) intrinsic expression, reflecting the model's inherent values learned during training, and (2) prompted expression, elicited by explicit prompts. Given their widespread use in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Jongwook Han , Jongwon Lim , Injin Kong , Yohan Jo

Neural network-based language models deal with data sparsity problems by mapping the large discrete space of words into a smaller continuous space of real-valued vectors. By learning distributed vector representations for words, each…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-09-27 Davide Nunes , Luis Antunes

Sparse computation offers a compelling solution for the inference of Large Language Models (LLMs) in low-resource scenarios by dynamically skipping the computation of inactive neurons. While traditional approaches focus on ReLU-based LLMs,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-07 Zhengyan Zhang , Yixin Song , Guanghui Yu , Xu Han , Yankai Lin , Chaojun Xiao , Chenyang Song , Zhiyuan Liu , Zeyu Mi , Maosong Sun

Reward models learned from human preferences are central to aligning large language models (LLMs) via reinforcement learning from human feedback, yet they are often vulnerable to reward hacking due to noisy annotations and systematic biases…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Zhibin Duan , Guowei Rong , Zhuo Li , Bo Chen , Mingyuan Zhou , Dandan Guo

Recent years have seen considerable advancements in multi-step reasoning with Large Language Models (LLMs). The previous studies have elucidated the merits of integrating feedback or search mechanisms during model inference to improve the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-17 Qianli Ma , Haotian Zhou , Tingkai Liu , Jianbo Yuan , Pengfei Liu , Yang You , Hongxia Yang

Under sparse extrinsic reward settings, reinforcement learning has remained challenging, despite surging interests in this field. Previous attempts suggest that intrinsic reward can alleviate the issue caused by sparsity. In this article,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-28 Zijian Gao , Kele Xu , Yuanzhao Zhai , Dawei Feng , Bo Ding , XinJun Mao , Huaimin Wang

Reward models in RLHF are trained to score only the final token of a response - a choice that discards rich signal from every intermediate position and produces models whose token-level outputs are noise. We argue this is a missed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Alex Nikulkov

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a key post-pretraining step for aligning large language models (LLMs) with complex tasks and human preferences. While it is often assumed that RL fine-tuning requires updating most of a model's parameters, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-30 Andrii Balashov

Large reasoning models (LRMs) have recently shown promise in solving complex math problems when optimized with Reinforcement Learning (RL). But conventional approaches rely on outcome-only rewards that provide sparse feedback, resulting in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-01 Tao He , Rongchuan Mu , Lizi Liao , Yixin Cao , Ming Liu , Bing Qin