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Despite notable advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), most state-of-the-art models have not undergone thorough alignment with human preferences. This gap exists because current alignment research has primarily achieved…

Most Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) adopt preference alignment techniques, e.g., DPO~\citep{rafailov2024dpo}, to optimize the reward margin between a winning response ($y_w$) and a losing response ($y_l$). However, the likelihood…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Xiaodong Wang , Jinfa Huang , Li Yuan , Peixi Peng

Despite rigorous safety alignment, Large Language Models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks. Existing black-box methods often rely on heuristic templates or exhaustive trials, lacking mechanistic interpretability and query…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Ziwei Wang , Jing Chen , Ruichao Liang , Zhi Wang , Yebo Feng , Ju Jia , Ruiying Du , Cong Wu , Yang Liu

Alignment of large language models (LLMs) with human preferences typically relies on supervised reward models or external judges that demand abundant annotations. However, in fields that rely on professional knowledge, such as medicine and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Yiyang Zhao , Huiyu Bai , Xuejiao Zhao

This work studies the behavior of shallow ReLU networks trained with the logistic loss via gradient descent on binary classification data where the underlying data distribution is general, and the (optimal) Bayes risk is not necessarily…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-05 Ziwei Ji , Justin D. Li , Matus Telgarsky

Direct Preference Optimization is an offline post-SFT method for aligning language models from preference pairs, with strong results in instruction following and summarization. However, DPO's sequence-level implicit reward can be brittle…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Samah Fodeh , Linhai Ma , Ganesh Puthiaraju , Srivani Talakokkul , Afshan Khan , Ashley Hagaman , Sarah R. Lowe , Aimee Kendall Roundtree

While Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely documented to be sensitive to minor prompt perturbations and prone to sycophantic alignment, their robustness in consequential, rule-bound decision-making remains under-explored. We uncover a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Jon Chun , Katherine Elkins

Through alignment with human preferences, Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced significantly in generating honest, harmless, and helpful responses. However, collecting high-quality preference data is a resource-intensive and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Qingxiu Dong , Li Dong , Xingxing Zhang , Zhifang Sui , Furu Wei

Recent progress in Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning is increasingly driven by the refinement of post-training loss functions and alignment strategies. However, standard Reinforcement Learning (RL) paradigms like Group Relative Policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Kishan Panaganti , Zhenwen Liang , Wenhao Yu , Haitao Mi , Dong Yu

We present the convergence rates of synchronous and asynchronous Q-learning for average-reward Markov decision processes, where the absence of contraction poses a fundamental challenge. Existing non-asymptotic results overcome this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Zijun Chen , Zaiwei Chen , Nian Si , Shengbo Wang

Designing model-free algorithms for distributionally robust reinforcement learning (DRRL) poses fundamental challenges. The robust Bellman operator is nonlinear in the transition kernel, which makes one-sample Bellman updates biased, while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Shengbo Wang , Zexi Zhang

Language model (LM) post-training (or alignment) involves maximizing a reward function that is derived from preference annotations. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a popular offline alignment method that trains a policy directly on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Adam Fisch , Jacob Eisenstein , Vicky Zayats , Alekh Agarwal , Ahmad Beirami , Chirag Nagpal , Pete Shaw , Jonathan Berant

Researchers illustrate improvements in contextual encoding strategies via resultant performance on a battery of shared Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks. Many of these tasks are of a categorical prediction variety: given a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-06-06 Zhongyang Li , Tongfei Chen , Benjamin Van Durme

Preference alignment methods are increasingly critical for steering large language models (LLMs) to generate outputs consistent with human values. While recent approaches often rely on synthetic data generated by LLMs for scalability and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Mingye Zhu , Yi Liu , Zheren Fu , Yongdong Zhang , Zhendong Mao

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has proven effective for Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning, yet current methods face key challenges in resource allocation and policy optimization dynamics: (i) uniform rollout…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Yangyi Fang , Jiaye Lin , Xiaoliang Fu , Cong Qin , Haolin Shi , Chaowen Hu , Lu Pan , Ke Zeng , Xunliang Cai

Learning representation from relative similarity comparisons, often called ordinal embedding, gains rising attention in recent years. Most of the existing methods are based on semi-definite programming (\textit{SDP}), which is generally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-03 Ke Ma , Jinshan Zeng , Qianqian Xu , Xiaochun Cao , Wei Liu , Yuan Yao

Utility preference robust optimization (PRO) has recently been proposed to deal with optimal decision making problems where the decision maker's (DM) preference over gains and losses is ambiguous. In this paper, we take a step further to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-03-11 Jian Hu , Dali Zhang , Huifu Xu , Sainan Zhang

With the growing deployment of sequential recommender systems in e-commerce and other fields, their black-box interfaces raise security concerns: models are vulnerable to extraction and subsequent adversarial manipulation. Existing…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Hongyue Zhang , Mingming Li , Dongqin Liu , Hui Wang , Yaning Zhang , Xi Zhou , Honglei Lv , Jiao Dai , Jizhong Han

Reward models are central to aligning large language models, yet they often overfit to spurious cues such as response length and overly agreeable tone. Most prior work weakens these cues directly by penalizing or controlling specific…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Yunsheng Lu , Zijiang Yang , Licheng Pan , Zhixuan Chu

Strategically locating a sawmill is vital for enhancing the efficiency, profitability, and sustainability of timber supply chains. Our study proposes a Learning-Based Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (LB-MCDM) framework that integrates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Mahid Ahmed , Ali Dogru , Chaoyang Zhang , Chao Meng