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Related papers: Theoretical Limits of Language Model Alignment

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Let $p$ denote a generative language model. Let $r$ denote a reward model that returns a scalar that captures the degree at which a draw from $p$ is preferred. The goal of language model alignment is to alter $p$ to a new distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-03 Joy Qiping Yang , Salman Salamatian , Ziteng Sun , Ananda Theertha Suresh , Ahmad Beirami

Policy alignment of large language models refers to constrained policy optimization, where the policy is optimized to maximize a reward while staying close to a reference policy with respect to an $f$-divergence such as the $\mathsf{KL}$…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Youssef Mroueh

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

Finetuning language models with reinforcement learning (RL), e.g. from human feedback (HF), is a prominent method for alignment. But optimizing against a reward model can improve on reward while degrading performance in other areas, a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-14 Michael Noukhovitch , Samuel Lavoie , Florian Strub , Aaron Courville

Language model alignment is a critical step in training modern generative language models. Alignment targets to improve win rate of a sample from the aligned model against the base model. Today, we are increasingly using inference-time…

Alignment via reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has become the dominant paradigm for controlling the quality of outputs from large language models (LLMs). However, existing theories do not provide strong justification for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Jihun Yun , Juno Kim , Jongho Park , Junhyuck Kim , Jongha Jon Ryu , Jaewoong Cho , Kwang-Sung Jun

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant progress in performing complex tasks. While Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has been effective in aligning LLMs with human preferences, it is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Chaoqi Wang , Zhuokai Zhao , Yibo Jiang , Zhaorun Chen , Chen Zhu , Yuxin Chen , Jiayi Liu , Lizhu Zhang , Xiangjun Fan , Hao Ma , Sinong Wang

We introduce ALaRM, the first framework modeling hierarchical rewards in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), which is designed to enhance the alignment of large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. The framework…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Yuhang Lai , Siyuan Wang , Shujun Liu , Xuanjing Huang , Zhongyu Wei

We study estimation and statistical inference for reward models used in aligning large language models (LLMs). A key component of LLM alignment is reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), where humans compare pairs of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-04 Pangpang Liu , Junwei Lu , Will Wei Sun

The reward model has become increasingly important in alignment, assessment, and data construction for large language models (LLMs). Most existing researchers focus on enhancing reward models through data improvements, following the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-09 Shujun Liu , Xiaoyu Shen , Yuhang Lai , Siyuan Wang , Shengbin Yue , Zengfeng Huang , Xuanjing Huang , Zhongyu Wei

Reinforcement Learning frameworks, particularly those utilizing human annotations, have become an increasingly popular method for preference fine-tuning, where the outputs of a language model are tuned to match a certain set of behavioral…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Archie Chaudhury

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is the standard method to align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences. In this work, we introduce alignment tampering, a potential vulnerability where the LLM undergoing…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Dongyoon Hahm , Dylan Hadfield-Menell , Kimin Lee

Pre-trained large-scale language models (LLMs) excel at producing coherent articles, yet their outputs may be untruthful, toxic, or fail to align with user expectations. Current approaches focus on using reinforcement learning with human…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Dehong Xu , Liang Qiu , Minseok Kim , Faisal Ladhak , Jaeyoung Do

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and its variants have emerged as the dominant approaches for aligning Large Language Models with human intent. While empirically effective, the theoretical generalization properties of these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-26 Zhaochun Li , Mingyang Yi , Yue Wang , Shisheng Cui , Yong Liu

Recent advances in aligning Large Language Models with human preferences have benefited from larger reward models and better preference data. However, most of these methodologies rely on the accuracy of the reward model. The reward models…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Debangshu Banerjee , Aditya Gopalan

We study the problem of computing an optimal large language model (LLM) policy for the constrained alignment problem, where the goal is to maximize a primary reward objective while satisfying constraints on secondary utilities. Despite the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Botong Zhang , Shuo Li , Ignacio Hounie , Osbert Bastani , Dongsheng Ding , Alejandro Ribeiro

The emergence of LM-based judging reward modeling, represented by generative reward models, has successfully made reinforcement learning from AI feedback (RLAIF) efficient and scalable. To further advance this paradigm, we propose a core…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Meiling Ning , Zhongbao Zhang , Junda Ye , Jiabao Guo , Qingyuan Guan

Language model calibration refers to the alignment between the confidence of the model and the actual performance of its responses. While previous studies point out the overconfidence phenomenon in Large Language Models (LLMs) and show that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Jixuan Leng , Chengsong Huang , Banghua Zhu , Jiaxin Huang

A common paradigm to improve the performance of large language models is optimizing for a reward model. Reward models assign a numerical score to an LLM's output that indicates, for example, how likely it is to align with user preferences…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-06 Hadi Khalaf , Claudio Mayrink Verdun , Alex Oesterling , Himabindu Lakkaraju , Flavio du Pin Calmon

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a powerful technique to make large language models (LLMs) more capable in complex settings. RLHF proceeds as collecting human preference data, training a reward model on said…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-05 Nathan Lambert , Roberto Calandra
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