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Learning a reward model (RM) from human preferences has been an important component in aligning large language models (LLMs). The canonical setup of learning RMs from pairwise preference data is rooted in the classic Bradley-Terry (BT)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-21 Shang Liu , Yu Pan , Guanting Chen , Xiaocheng Li

AI agents are commonly aligned with "human values" through reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), where a single reward model is learned from aggregated human feedback and used to align an agent's behavior. However, human values…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Carter Blair , Kate Larson , Edith Law

Test-Time Prompt Tuning (TPT) adapts vision-language models using augmented views, but its effectiveness is hindered by the challenge of determining which views are beneficial. Standard entropy-based filtering relies on the internal…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Jungwon Choi , Eunwoo Kim

Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) is a paradigm in which an RL agent learns to optimize a task using pair-wise preference-based feedback over trajectories, rather than explicit reward signals. While PbRL has demonstrated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-18 Wenhao Zhan , Masatoshi Uehara , Wen Sun , Jason D. Lee

Reward-guided text generation (RGTG) has emerged as a viable alternative to offline reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). RGTG methods can align baseline language models to human preferences without further training like in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Ahmad Rashid , Ruotian Wu , Rongqi Fan , Hongliang Li , Agustinus Kristiadi , Pascal Poupart

Human feedback often arrives as preferences rather than calibrated numeric rewards, motivating reinforcement learning from preferential feedback, also referred to as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). We present a rigorous…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-26 Nikola Pavlovic , Sattar Vakili , Qing Zhao

A reliable reward model is essential for aligning large language models with human preferences through reinforcement learning from human feedback. However, standard reward models are susceptible to spurious features that are not causally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Yupei Yang , Lin Yang , Wanxi Deng , Lin Qu , Fan Feng , Biwei Huang , Shikui Tu , Lei Xu

The complexity of designing reward functions has been a major obstacle to the wide application of deep reinforcement learning (RL) techniques. Describing an agent's desired behaviors and properties can be difficult, even for experts. A new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-09 Wanqi Xue , Bo An , Shuicheng Yan , Zhongwen Xu

Reward modelling from preference data is a crucial step in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values, requiring robust generalisation to novel prompt-response pairs. In this work, we propose to frame this problem in a causal…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Katarzyna Kobalczyk , Mihaela van der Schaar

Designing reward functions for efficiently guiding reinforcement learning (RL) agents toward specific behaviors is a complex task. This is challenging since it requires the identification of reward structures that are not sparse and that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Dhawal Gupta , Yash Chandak , Scott M. Jordan , Philip S. Thomas , Bruno Castro da Silva

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across diverse natural language tasks, yet the reward models employed for aligning LLMs often encounter challenges of reward hacking, where the approaches predominantly rely on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Biao Liu , Ning Xu , Junming Yang , Hao Xu , Xin Geng

Reward guidance, also known as posterior sampling, is a popular method for test-time adaptation and post-training in continuous diffusion models. In this paper, we study reward guidance for discrete diffusion language models; now, one…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Atula Tejaswi , Litu Rout , Constantine Caramanis , Sanjay Shakkottai , Sujay Sanghavi

Building neural reward models from human preferences is a pivotal component in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and large language model alignment research. Given the scarcity and high cost of human annotation, how to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Yunyi Shen , Hao Sun , Jean-François Ton

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed via public-facing interfaces to interact with millions of users, each with diverse preferences. Despite this, preference tuning of LLMs predominantly relies on reward models trained…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-06 Vishakh Padmakumar , Chuanyang Jin , Hannah Rose Kirk , He He

Preference-based reward learning is widely used for shaping agent behavior to match a user's preference, yet its sparse binary feedback makes it especially vulnerable to causal confusion. The learned reward often latches onto spurious…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Minjune Hwang , Yigit Korkmaz , Daniel Seita , Erdem Bıyık

Weak-to-strong (W2S) generalization is a promising framework for scalable oversight, yet existing evaluations often test students under matched train-test distributions. Therefore, we study W2S preference learning under zero-shot…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Khoi Le , Tri Cao , Phong Nguyen , Cong-Duy Nguyen , Anh Tuan Luu , Miao Chunyan , See-Kiong Ng , Thong Nguyen

To ensure that large language model (LLM) responses are helpful and non-toxic, a reward model trained on human preference data is usually used. LLM responses with high rewards are then selected through best-of-$n$ (BoN) sampling or the LLM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-04 Adam X. Yang , Maxime Robeyns , Thomas Coste , Zhengyan Shi , Jun Wang , Haitham Bou-Ammar , Laurence Aitchison

Aligning multimodal generative models with human preferences demands reward signals that respect the compositional, multi-dimensional structure of human judgment. Prevailing RLHF approaches reduce this structure to scalar or pairwise…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Juanxi Tian , Fengyuan Liu , Jiaming Han , Yilei Jiang , Yongliang Wu , Yesheng Liu , Haodong Li , Furong Xu , Wanhua Li

Pointwise reward modeling offers critical signals for LLM post-training, yet struggles with absolute scoring in subjective, non-verifiable settings. Rubric-based methods address this by decomposing evaluation into explicit criteria, but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Haoxiang Jiang , Zihan Dong , Tianci Liu , Wanying Wang , Ran Xu , Tony Yu , Linjun Zhang , Haoyu Wang

In the context of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), the reward function is generally derived from maximum likelihood estimation of a random utility model based on pairwise comparisons made by humans. The problem of learning…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-11-08 Luise Ge , Daniel Halpern , Evi Micha , Ariel D. Procaccia , Itai Shapira , Yevgeniy Vorobeychik , Junlin Wu