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Common methods for aligning already-capable models with desired behavior rely on the ability of humans to provide supervision. However, future superhuman models will surpass the capability of humans. Therefore, humans will only be able to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-24 Hao Lang , Fei Huang , Yongbin Li

Weak-to-Strong Generalization (Burns et al., 2024) is the phenomenon whereby a strong student, say GPT-4, learns a task from a weak teacher, say GPT-2, and ends up significantly outperforming the teacher. We show that this phenomenon does…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Marko Medvedev , Kaifeng Lyu , Dingli Yu , Sanjeev Arora , Zhiyuan Li , Nathan Srebro

Steering the behavior of a strong model pre-trained on internet-scale data can be difficult due to the scarcity of competent supervisors. Recent studies reveal that, despite supervisory noises, a strong student model may surpass its weak…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-26 Yuejiang Liu , Alexandre Alahi

We have witnessed superhuman intelligence thanks to the fast development of large language models and multimodal language models. As the application of such superhuman models becomes more and more popular, a critical question arises here:…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Minlie Huang , Yingkang Wang , Shiyao Cui , Pei Ke , Jie Tang

The evaluation and post-training of large language models (LLMs) rely on supervision, but strong supervision for difficult tasks is often unavailable, especially when evaluating frontier models. In such cases, models are demonstrated to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Tianyi Alex Qiu , Micah Carroll , Cameron Allen

Weak-to-strong (W2S) generalization is a type of finetuning (FT) where a strong (large) student model is trained on pseudo-labels generated by a weak teacher. Surprisingly, W2S FT often outperforms the weak teacher. We seek to understand…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Yijun Dong , Yicheng Li , Yunai Li , Jason D. Lee , Qi Lei

Existing weak supervision approaches use all the data covered by weak signals to train a classifier. We show both theoretically and empirically that this is not always optimal. Intuitively, there is a tradeoff between the amount of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-03-08 Hunter Lang , Aravindan Vijayaraghavan , David Sontag

As future superhuman models become increasingly complex, accurately supervising their behavior may exceed human capabilities. Recent works have demonstrated that in such scenarios, weak models can effectively supervise strong models, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Myeongho Jeon , Jan Sobotka , Suhwan Choi , Maria Brbić

Weak-to-strong generalization refers to the phenomenon where a stronger model trained under supervision from a weaker one can outperform its teacher. While prior studies aim to explain this effect, most theoretical insights are limited to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-30 Junsoo Oh , Jerry Song , Chulhee Yun

Data-driven models, especially deep learning classifiers often demonstrate great success on clean datasets. Yet, they remain vulnerable to common data distortions such as adversarial and common corruption perturbations. These perturbations…

In practical machine learning applications, it is often challenging to assign accurate labels to data, and increasing the number of labeled instances is often limited. In such cases, Weakly Supervised Learning (WSL), which enables training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Tomoya Tate , Kosuke Sugiyama , Masato Uchida

Large language models exhibit systematic vulnerabilities to adversarial attacks despite extensive safety alignment. We provide a mechanistic analysis revealing that position-dependent gradient weakening during autoregressive training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Thong Bach , Dung Nguyen , Thao Minh Le , Truyen Tran

As large language models (LLMs) are rapidly advancing and achieving near-human capabilities on specific tasks, aligning them with human values is becoming more urgent. In scenarios where LLMs outperform humans, we face a weak-to-strong…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Yougang Lyu , Lingyong Yan , Zihan Wang , Dawei Yin , Pengjie Ren , Maarten de Rijke , Zhaochun Ren

In many applications, training machine learning models involves using large amounts of human-annotated data. Obtaining precise labels for the data is expensive. Instead, training with weak supervision provides a low-cost alternative. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-09 Chidubem Arachie , Bert Huang

Learning disentangled representations that correspond to factors of variation in real-world data is critical to interpretable and human-controllable machine learning. Recently, concerns about the viability of learning disentangled…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-14 Rui Shu , Yining Chen , Abhishek Kumar , Stefano Ermon , Ben Poole

Individuals use models to guide decisions, but many models are wrong. This paper studies which misspecified models are likely to persist when individuals also entertain alternative models. Consider an agent who uses her model to learn the…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2023-08-22 Cuimin Ba

Aligning language models (LMs) with human preferences has become a key area of research, enabling these models to meet diverse user needs better. Inspired by weak-to-strong generalization, where a strong LM fine-tuned on labels generated by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-07 Wenhong Zhu , Zhiwei He , Xiaofeng Wang , Pengfei Liu , Rui Wang

Weak-to-strong generalization (W2SG) refers to the phenomenon where a strong student model, trained on a dataset labeled by a weak teacher, ultimately outperforms the teacher on the target task. Recent studies attribute this performance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Gengze Xu , Wei Yao , Ziqiao Wang , Yong Liu

Aligning large-scale commercial models with user intent is crucial to preventing harmful outputs. Current methods rely on human supervision but become impractical as model complexity increases. When models surpass human knowledge, providing…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Jinhao Li , Sarah M. Erfani , Lei Feng , James Bailey , Feng Liu

Weak-to-strong generalization, where a student model trained on imperfect labels generated by a weaker teacher nonetheless surpasses that teacher, has been widely observed but the mechanisms that enable it have remained poorly understood.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-27 Behrad Moniri , Hamed Hassani