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Recent work shows that preference alignment objectives can be interpreted as divergence estimators between aligned (preferred) & unaligned (less-preferred) distributions, yielding a principled recipe for designing alignment losses. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Rajdeep Haldar , Lantao Mei , Guang Lin , Yue Xing , Qifan Song

Inference scaling further accelerates Large Language Models (LLMs) toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), with large-scale Reinforcement Learning (RL) to unleash long Chain-of-Thought reasoning. Most contemporary reasoning approaches…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Xuerui Su , Liya Guo , Yue Wang , Yi Zhu , Zhiming Ma , Zun Wang , Yuting Liu

Training reinforcement learning (RL) systems in real-world environments remains challenging due to noisy supervision and poor out-of-domain (OOD) generalization, especially in LLM post-training. Recent distributional RL methods improve…

Despite the fact that offline methods for Large Language Models (LLMs) alignment do not require a direct reward model, they remain susceptible to overoptimization. This issue arises when the trained model deviates excessively from the…

Iterative data generation and model retraining are widely used to align large language models (LLMs). It typically involves a policy model to generate on-policy responses and a reward model to guide training data selection. Direct…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Yao Xiao , Hai Ye , Linyao Chen , Hwee Tou Ng , Lidong Bing , Xiaoli Li , Roy Ka-wei Lee

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables learning effective policies from fixed datasets without any environment interaction. Existing methods typically employ policy constraints to mitigate the distribution shift encountered during…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Tan Jing , Xiaorui Li , Chao Yao , Xiaojuan Ban , Yuetong Fang , Renjing Xu , Zhaolin Yuan

Online reinforcement learning (RL) methods are often data-inefficient or unreliable, making them difficult to train on real robotic hardware, especially quadruped robots. Learning robotic tasks from pre-collected data is a promising…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Hongyin Zhang , Shuyu Yang , Donglin Wang

Taking advantage of their data-driven and model-free features, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms have the potential to deal with the increasing level of uncertainty due to the introduction of renewable-based generation. To deal…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-08-02 Hou Shengren , Edgar Mauricio Salazar , Pedro P. Vergara , Peter Palensky

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a widely used offline preference optimization algorithm that reparameterizes reward functions in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to enhance simplicity and training stability. In this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Yu Meng , Mengzhou Xia , Danqi Chen

In this paper, we show that Simple Preference Optimization (SimPO) can be derived as Maximum Entropy Reinforcement Learning, providing a theoretical foundation for this reference-free method. Motivated by SimPO's strong performance in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Ömer Veysel Çağatan , Barış Akgün

Reinforcement learning (RL) is widely used for post-training large language models (LLMs) in code editing, where group-relative methods, such as GRPO, are popular due to their critic-free and normalized advantage estimation. However, in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Jianqing Zhang , Zhezheng Hao , Wei Xia , Hande Dong , Hong Wang , Chenxing Wei , Yuyan Zhou , Yubin Qi , Qiang Lin , Jian Cao

Language models must now generalize out of the box to novel environments and work inside inference-scaling search procedures, such as AlphaEvolve, that select rollouts with a variety of task-specific reward functions. Unfortunately, the…

The post-training of LLMs, which typically consists of the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stage and the preference learning stage (RLHF or DPO), is crucial to effective and safe LLM applications. The widely adopted approach in post-training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Heshan Fernando , Han Shen , Parikshit Ram , Yi Zhou , Horst Samulowitz , Nathalie Baracaldo , Tianyi Chen

This research investigates the effectiveness of alignment techniques, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), and a combined SFT+DPO approach on improving the safety and helpfulness of the OPT-350M language…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Piyush Pant

Post-training with reinforcement learning (RL) typically optimizes a single scalar objective and ignores structure in how solutions are produced. We ask whether a scalar hint toward a canonical solver ordering, used only during RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Prakhar Gupta , Vaibhav Gupta

Whole-page optimization (WPO) decides how search and recommendation results are surfaced to users, and large language models (LLMs) open a new route to it by treating page generation as sequence generation. Adapting LLMs to web-scale WPO,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Xinyuan Wang , Liang Wu , Dongjie Wang , Yanjie Fu

State-of-the-art large multi-modal models (LMMs) face challenges when processing high-resolution images, as these inputs are converted into enormous visual tokens, many of which are irrelevant to the downstream task. In this paper, we…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Xinyu Huang , Yuhao Dong , Weiwei Tian , Bo Li , Rui Feng , Ziwei Liu

Preference-based reinforcement learning (RL) is a key paradigm for aligning policies with human judgments, yet its theoretical behavior in distributed settings where preference data are fragmented across heterogeneous users remains poorly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Zhanhong Jiang

As large language models (LLMs) continue to scale in size, the computational overhead has become a major bottleneck for task-specific fine-tuning. While low-rank adaptation (LoRA) effectively curtails this cost by confining the weight…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Yilang Zhang , Xiaodong Yang , Yiwei Cai , Georgios B. Giannakis

Model-based offline reinforcement Learning (RL) is a promising approach that leverages existing data effectively in many real-world applications, especially those involving high-dimensional inputs like images and videos. To alleviate the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-06-17 Shenghua Wan , Ziyuan Chen , Le Gan , Shuai Feng , De-Chuan Zhan