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With the rapidly expanding landscape of large language models, aligning model generations with human values and preferences is becoming increasingly important. Popular alignment methods, such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Mingye Zhu , Yi Liu , Lei Zhang , Junbo Guo , Zhendong Mao

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has been widely adopted to align language models (LMs) with human preference. Prior RLHF works typically take a bandit formulation, which, though intuitive, ignores the sequential nature of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-07 Yueqin Yin , Shentao Yang , Yujia Xie , Ziyi Yang , Yuting Sun , Hany Awadalla , Weizhu Chen , Mingyuan Zhou

We reformulate explanation quality assessment as a ranking problem rather than a generation problem. Instead of optimizing models to produce a single "best" explanation token-by-token, we train reward models to discriminate among multiple…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Thomas Bailleux , Tanmoy Mukherjee , Emmanuel Lonca , Pierre Marquis , Zied Bouraoui

The potential of reinforcement learning (RL) to deliver aligned and performant agents is partially bottlenecked by the reward engineering problem. One alternative to heuristic trial-and-error is preference-based RL (PbRL), where a reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-22 Tom Bewley , Freddy Lecue

The reward model (RM) that represents human preferences plays a crucial role in optimizing the outputs of large language models (LLMs), e.g., through reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) or rejection sampling. However, a long…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Yizhou Chen , Yawen Liu , Xuesi Wang , Qingtao Yu , Guangda Huzhang , Anxiang Zeng , Han Yu , Zhiming Zhou

Reward models (RMs) are central to aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values but have received less attention than pretrained and post-trained LLMs themselves. Because RMs are initialized from LLMs, they inherit…

Reward models (RMs) are crucial for the training and inference-time scaling up of large language models (LLMs). However, existing reward models primarily focus on human preferences, neglecting verifiable correctness signals which have shown…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-27 Hao Peng , Yunjia Qi , Xiaozhi Wang , Zijun Yao , Bin Xu , Lei Hou , Juanzi Li

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) relies on preference modeling to align machine learning systems with human values, yet the popular approach of random pair sampling with Bradley-Terry modeling is statistically limited and…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Andreas Chouliaras , Dimitris Chatzopoulos

Offline preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) provides an effective way to overcome the challenges of designing reward and the high costs of online interaction. However, since labeling preference needs real-time human feedback,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Xiao-Yin Liu , Guotao Li , Xiao-Hu Zhou , Zeng-Guang Hou

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) requires access to a reward function that incentivizes the right behavior, but these are notoriously hard to specify for complex tasks. Preference-based RL provides an alternative: learning policies using a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-05 Kimin Lee , Laura Smith , Anca Dragan , Pieter Abbeel

Reward models are central to aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. Yet most approaches rely on pointwise reward estimates that overlook the epistemic uncertainty in reward models arising from limited human feedback.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Daniel Yang , Samuel Stante , Florian Redhardt , Lena Libon , Parnian Kassraie , Ido Hakimi , Barna Pásztor , Andreas Krause

Reinforcement learning with human feedback for aligning large language models (LLMs) trains a reward model typically using ranking loss with comparison pairs.However, the training procedure suffers from an inherent problem: the uncontrolled…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-19 Hang Zhou , Chenglong Wang , Yimin Hu , Tong Xiao , Chunliang Zhang , Jingbo Zhu

We introduce a new benchmark for reward models that quantifies their ability to produce strong language models through RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback). The gold-standard approach is to run a full RLHF training pipeline and…

Aligning language models with human preferences through reinforcement learning from human feedback is crucial for their safe and effective deployment. The human preference is typically represented through comparison where one response is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Hoang Anh Just , Ming Jin , Anit Sahu , Huy Phan , Ruoxi Jia

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…

A shortcoming of batch reinforcement learning is its requirement for rewards in data, thus not applicable to tasks without reward functions. Existing settings for lack of reward, such as behavioral cloning, rely on optimal demonstrations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-30 Guoxi Zhang , Hisashi Kashima

Learning a reward function from human preferences is challenging as it typically requires having a high-fidelity simulator or using expensive and potentially unsafe actual physical rollouts in the environment. However, in many tasks the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-18 Daniel Shin , Daniel S. Brown , Anca D. Dragan

Learning from preference feedback is a common practice for aligning large language models~(LLMs) with human value. Conventionally, preference data is learned and encoded into a scalar reward model that connects a value head with an LLM to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Ziyi Ye , Xiangsheng Li , Qiuchi Li , Qingyao Ai , Yujia Zhou , Wei Shen , Dong Yan , Yiqun Liu

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