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Self-play alignment has emerged as an effective approach for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs), formulating preference optimization as a two-player game. However, the regularization with respect to the reference policy, which is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-09 Xiaohang Tang , Sangwoong Yoon , Seongho Son , Huizhuo Yuan , Quanquan Gu , Ilija Bogunovic

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is widely used for critic-free Large Language Model (LLM) post-training, but its KL regularization is usually implemented as a local loss-side token penalty. We show that this misses the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Jiarui Yao , Ruida Wang , Hao Bai , Tong Zhang

The alignment of language models~(LMs) with human preferences is critical for building reliable AI systems. The problem is typically framed as optimizing an LM policy to maximize the expected reward that reflects human preferences.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Zetian Sun , Dongfang Li , Xuhui Chen , Baotian Hu , Min Zhang

In this paper, we explore how directly pretraining a value model simplifies and stabilizes reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). In reinforcement learning, value estimation is the key to policy optimization, distinct from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Chenghua Huang , Lu Wang , Fangkai Yang , Pu Zhao , Zhixu Li , Qingwei Lin , Dongmei Zhang , Saravan Rajmohan , Qi Zhang

Collecting high-quality preference datasets for reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is resource-intensive and challenging. As a result, researchers often train reward models on extensive offline datasets which aggregate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Shambhavi Krishna , Aishwarya Sahoo

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

Reinforcement learning has been central to recent advances in large language model reasoning, but most algorithms rely on on-policy training that demands fresh rollouts at every update, limiting efficiency and scalability. Asynchronous RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Haizhong Zheng , Jiawei Zhao , Beidi Chen

Link functions, which characterize how human preferences are generated from the value function of an RL problem, are a crucial component in designing RLHF algorithms. Almost all RLHF algorithms, including state-of-the-art ones in empirical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Qining Zhang , Lei Ying

The increasing capabilities of large language models (LLMs) raise opportunities for artificial general intelligence but concurrently amplify safety concerns, such as potential misuse of AI systems, necessitating effective AI alignment.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-29 Chaoqi Wang , Yibo Jiang , Chenghao Yang , Han Liu , Yuxin Chen

Existing alignment methods directly use the reward model learned from user preference data to optimize an LLM policy, subject to KL regularization with respect to the base policy. This practice is suboptimal for maximizing user's utility…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Haichuan Wang , Tao Lin , Lingkai Kong , Ce Li , Hezi Jiang , Milind Tambe

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has become the standard approach for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences, allowing LLMs to demonstrate remarkable abilities in various tasks. Existing methods work…

In large language model (LLM)-based recommendation systems, direct preference optimization (DPO) effectively aligns recommendations with user preferences, requiring multi-negative objective functions to leverage abundant implicit-feedback…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Xingyu Hu , Kai Zhang , Jiancan Wu , Shuli Wang , Chi Wang , Wenshuai Chen , Yinhua Zhu , Haitao Wang , Xingxing Wang , Xiang Wang

The alignment of large language models (LLMs) with human preferences remains a key challenge. While post-training techniques like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) have achieved…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-11 Qingyu Yin , Chak Tou Leong , Minjun Zhu , Hanqi Yan , Qiang Zhang , Yulan He , Wenjie Li , Jun Wang , Yue Zhang , Linyi Yang

Recent advances in large video-language models (VLMs) rely on extensive fine-tuning techniques that strengthen alignment between textual and visual comprehension. Leading pipelines typically pair supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Derek Shi , Ruben Glatt , Christine Klymko , Shubham Mohole , Hongjun Choi , Shashank Kushwaha , Sam Sakla , Felipe Leno da Silva

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback aligns the outputs of Large Language Models with human values and preferences. Central to this process is the reward model (RM), which translates human feedback into training signals for optimising…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Zeyu Huang , Zihan Qiu , Zili Wang , Edoardo M. Ponti , Ivan Titov

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is an effective method for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values. However, reward over-optimization remains an open challenge leading to discrepancies between the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Juntao Dai , Taiye Chen , Yaodong Yang , Qian Zheng , Gang Pan

Current RLHF methods such as PPO and DPO typically reduce human preferences to binary labels, which are costly to obtain and too coarse to reflect individual variation. We observe that expressions of satisfaction and dissatisfaction follow…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 YuXuan Zhang

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has recently enhanced the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), particularly for mathematical problem solving. However, a fundamental limitation remains: as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Wenhao Deng , Long Wei , Chenglei Yu , Tailin Wu

Adapting large language models (LLMs) for specific tasks usually involves fine-tuning through reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) on preference data. While these data often come from diverse labelers' groups (e.g., different…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Shyam Sundhar Ramesh , Yifan Hu , Iason Chaimalas , Viraj Mehta , Pier Giuseppe Sessa , Haitham Bou Ammar , Ilija Bogunovic

Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) and its variants have made huge strides toward the effective alignment of large language models (LLMs) to follow instructions and reflect human values. More recently, Direct Alignment…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Aman Gupta , Shao Tang , Qingquan Song , Sirou Zhu , Jiwoo Hong , Ankan Saha , Viral Gupta , Noah Lee , Eunki Kim , Siyu Zhu , Parag Agrawal , Natesh Pillai , S. Sathiya Keerthi