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Related papers: Theoretical Limits of Language Model Alignment

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Large Multimodal Models (LMM) are built across modalities and the misalignment between two modalities can result in "hallucination", generating textual outputs that are not grounded by the multimodal information in context. To address the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-09-27 Zhiqing Sun , Sheng Shen , Shengcao Cao , Haotian Liu , Chunyuan Li , Yikang Shen , Chuang Gan , Liang-Yan Gui , Yu-Xiong Wang , Yiming Yang , Kurt Keutzer , Trevor Darrell

LLM alignment ensures that large language models behave safely and effectively by aligning their outputs with human values, goals, and intentions. Aligning LLMs employ huge amounts of data, computation, and time. Moreover, curating data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Amrit Khera , Rajat Ghosh , Debojyoti Dutta

We propose FlowRL: matching the full reward distribution via flow balancing instead of maximizing rewards in large language model (LLM) reinforcement learning (RL). Recent advanced reasoning models adopt reward-maximizing methods (\eg, PPO…

This paper investigates the so-called reward-balancing methods, a novel class of algorithms for solving discounted-return reinforcement learning (RL) problems. These methods consist of iteratively adjusting the reward function to transform…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-23 Simone Baroncini , Bahman Gharesifard , Giuseppe Notarstefano

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as the main paradigm for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. Typically, RLHF involves the initial step of learning a reward model from human feedback,…

While large-scale unsupervised language models (LMs) learn broad world knowledge and some reasoning skills, achieving precise control of their behavior is difficult due to the completely unsupervised nature of their training. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-31 Rafael Rafailov , Archit Sharma , Eric Mitchell , Stefano Ermon , Christopher D. Manning , Chelsea Finn

We provide a theoretical framework for Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF). Our analysis shows that when the true reward function is linear, the widely used maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) converges under both the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-09 Banghua Zhu , Jiantao Jiao , Michael I. Jordan

Reward learning enables the application of reinforcement learning (RL) to tasks where reward is defined by human judgment, building a model of reward by asking humans questions. Most work on reward learning has used simulated environments,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-01-10 Daniel M. Ziegler , Nisan Stiennon , Jeffrey Wu , Tom B. Brown , Alec Radford , Dario Amodei , Paul Christiano , Geoffrey Irving

Reward modeling in large language models is susceptible to reward hacking, causing models to latch onto superficial features such as the tendency to generate lists or unnecessarily long responses. In reinforcement learning from human…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Taneesh Gupta , Shivam Shandilya , Xuchao Zhang , Rahul Madhavan , Supriyo Ghosh , Chetan Bansal , Huaxiu Yao , Saravan Rajmohan

Beyond maximum likelihood estimation (MLE), the standard objective of a language model (LM) that optimizes good examples probabilities, many studies have explored ways that also penalize bad examples for enhancing the quality of output…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-30 Yi-Lin Tuan , William Yang Wang

A central belief in scaling reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards for instruction following (IF) tasks is that, a diverse mixture of verifiable hard and unverifiable soft constraints is essential for generalizing to unseen…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Yirong Zeng , Yufei Liu , Xiao Ding , Yutai Hou , Yuxian Wang , Haonan Song , Wu Ning , Dandan Tu , Qixun Zhang , Bibo Cai , Yuxiang He , Ting Liu

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been used to finetune Large Language Models (LLMs) using a reward model trained from preference data, to better align with human judgment. The recently introduced direct alignment methods, which are often…

Pluralistic alignment has emerged as a critical frontier in the development of Large Language Models (LLMs), with reward models (RMs) serving as a central mechanism for capturing diverse human values. While benchmarks for general response…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Qiyao Ma , Dechen Gao , Rui Cai , Boqi Zhao , Hanchu Zhou , Junshan Zhang , Zhe Zhao

Deep Reinforcement Learning is widely used for aligning Large Language Models (LLM) with human preference. However, the conventional reward modelling is predominantly dependent on human annotations provided by a select cohort of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Dexun Li , Cong Zhang , Kuicai Dong , Derrick Goh Xin Deik , Ruiming Tang , Yong Liu

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) emerges as a promising paradigm for aligning large language models (LLMs). However, a notable challenge in RLHF is overoptimization, where beyond a certain threshold, the pursuit of higher…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-02 Yuanzhao Zhai , Han Zhang , Yu Lei , Yue Yu , Kele Xu , Dawei Feng , Bo Ding , Huaimin Wang

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as the primary method for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. While it enables LLMs to achieve human-level alignment, it often incurs significant…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Shivank Garg , Ayush Singh , Shweta Singh , Paras Chopra

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences is crucial for their deployment in real-world applications. Recent advancements in Self-Rewarding Language Models suggest that an LLM can use its internal reward models (such as…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-14 Xin Zhou , Yiwen Guo , Ruotian Ma , Tao Gui , Qi Zhang , Xuanjing Huang

Scaling test-time computation with reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a reliable path to improve large language models (LLM) reasoning ability. Yet, outcome-based reward often incentivizes models to be overconfident, leading to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Liaoyaqi Wang , Chunsheng Zuo , William Jurayj , Benjamin Van Durme , Anqi Liu

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) aligns Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences, yet the underlying reward signals they internalize remain hidden, posing a critical challenge for interpretability and safety.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Nyal Patel , Matthieu Bou , Arjun Jagota , Satyapriya Krishna , Sonali Parbhoo

With the rapid advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), aligning LLMs with human preferences become increasingly important. Although Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) proves effective, it is complicated and highly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Shiqi Wang , Zhengze Zhang , Rui Zhao , Fei Tan , Cam Tu Nguyen