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Related papers: Theoretical Limits of Language Model Alignment

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Current reinforcement learning objectives for large-model reasoning primarily focus on maximizing expected rewards. This paradigm can lead to overfitting to dominant reward signals, while neglecting alternative yet valid reasoning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Wendi Li , Sharon Li

Recent self-rewarding large language models (LLM) have successfully applied LLM-as-a-Judge to iteratively improve the alignment performance without the need of human annotations for preference data. These methods commonly utilize the same…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Zhaoyang Wang , Weilei He , Zhiyuan Liang , Xuchao Zhang , Chetan Bansal , Ying Wei , Weitong Zhang , Huaxiu Yao

We show that when large language models learn to reward hack on production RL environments, this can result in egregious emergent misalignment. We start with a pretrained model, impart knowledge of reward hacking strategies via synthetic…

Text-to-image generation models have achieved remarkable progress in preference optimization, yet achieving robust alignment across diverse reward models remains a significant challenge. Existing multi-reward fusion approaches rely on…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Ying Ba , Tianyu Zhang , Mohan Zhou , Yalong Bai , Wenyi Mo , Guiwei Zhang , Bing Su , Ji-Rong Wen

Reward hacking arises when a model improves a proxy reward by exploiting shortcuts rather than solving the intended task. We study this failure mode through the geometry of reinforcement learning updates in language models and argue that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Wenlong Deng , Jiaji Huang , Kaan Ozkara , Yushu Li , Christos Thrampoulidis , Xiaoxiao Li , Youngsuk Park

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) aligns language models to human preferences by employing a singular reward model derived from preference data. However, such an approach overlooks the rich diversity of human preferences…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Souradip Chakraborty , Jiahao Qiu , Hui Yuan , Alec Koppel , Furong Huang , Dinesh Manocha , Amrit Singh Bedi , Mengdi Wang

Modern large language models (LLMs) are optimized for human-aligned responses using Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). However, existing RLHF approaches assume a universal preference model and fail to account for individual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Idan Shenfeld , Felix Faltings , Pulkit Agrawal , Aldo Pacchiano

Techniques that learn improved representations via offline data or self-supervised objectives have shown impressive results in traditional reinforcement learning (RL). Nevertheless, it is unclear how improved representation learning can…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-25 Vaskar Nath , Dylan Slack , Jeff Da , Yuntao Ma , Hugh Zhang , Spencer Whitehead , Sean Hendryx

We present an approach called Q-probing to adapt a pre-trained language model to maximize a task-specific reward function. At a high level, Q-probing sits between heavier approaches such as finetuning and lighter approaches such as few shot…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Kenneth Li , Samy Jelassi , Hugh Zhang , Sham Kakade , Martin Wattenberg , David Brandfonbrener

Large language models (LLMs) have formulated a blueprint for the advancement of artificial general intelligence. Its primary objective is to function as a human-centric (helpful, honest, and harmless) assistant. Alignment with humans…

In the era of Large Language Models (LLMs), alignment has emerged as a fundamental yet challenging problem in the pursuit of more reliable, controllable, and capable machine intelligence. The recent success of reasoning models and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-18 Hao Sun , Mihaela van der Schaar

Large Language Models (LLM) alignment aims to prevent models from producing content that misaligns with human expectations, which can lead to ethical and legal concerns. In the last few years, Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Biao Liu , Ning Xu , Xin Geng

A simple and effective method for the inference-time alignment and scaling test-time compute of generative models is best-of-$n$ sampling, where $n$ samples are drawn from a reference policy, ranked based on a reward function, and the…

The availability of large pre-trained models is changing the landscape of Machine Learning research and practice, moving from a training-from-scratch to a fine-tuning paradigm. While in some applications the goal is to "nudge" the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Tomasz Korbak , Hady Elsahar , Germán Kruszewski , Marc Dymetman

While astonishingly capable, large Language Models (LLM) can sometimes produce outputs that deviate from human expectations. Such deviations necessitate an alignment phase to prevent disseminating untruthful, toxic, or biased information.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-30 Long Tan Le , Han Shu , Tung-Anh Nguyen , Choong Seon Hong , Nguyen H. Tran

Aligning generative models with human preference via RLHF typically suffers from overoptimization, where an imperfectly learned reward model can misguide the generative model to output undesired responses. We investigate this problem in a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-05 Zhihan Liu , Miao Lu , Shenao Zhang , Boyi Liu , Hongyi Guo , Yingxiang Yang , Jose Blanchet , Zhaoran Wang

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback significantly enhances Natural Language Processing by aligning language models with human expectations. A critical factor in this alignment is the strength of reward models used during training.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-17 Yanjun Chen , Dawei Zhu , Yirong Sun , Xinghao Chen , Wei Zhang , Xiaoyu Shen

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a important paradigm for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences during post-training. This framework typically involves two stages: first, training a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Wenyuan Xu , Xiaochen Zuo , Chao Xin , Yu Yue , Lin Yan , Yonghui Wu

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a predominant technique to align language models (LMs) with human preferences or promote outputs which are deemed to be desirable by a given reward function. Standard RL approaches optimize average…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Stephen Zhao , Aidan Li , Rob Brekelmans , Roger Grosse

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as an effective approach to aligning large language models (LLMs) to human preferences. RLHF contains three steps, i.e., human preference collecting, reward learning, and policy…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-29 Hao Lang , Fei Huang , Yongbin Li
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