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Reward-based alignment methods for large language models (LLMs) face two key limitations: vulnerability to reward hacking, where models exploit flaws in the reward signal; and reliance on brittle, labor-intensive prompt engineering when…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Zae Myung Kim , Chanwoo Park , Vipul Raheja , Suin Kim , Dongyeop Kang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has proven highly effective in aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences. Typical RL methods optimize under an overall sequence reward, which can lead to a suboptimal learning process. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Yanshi Li , Shaopan Xiong , Gengru Chen , Xiaoyang Li , Yijia Luo , Xingyuan Bu , Yingshui Tan , Wenbo Su , Bo Zheng

The alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) is critically dependent on reward models trained on costly human preference data. While recent work explores bypassing this cost with AI feedback, these methods often lack a rigorous theoretical…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Yi-Chen Li , Tian Xu , Yang Yu , Xuqin Zhang , Xiong-Hui Chen , Zhongxiang Ling , Ningjing Chao , Lei Yuan , Zhi-Hua Zhou

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

Reward Models (RMs) are critical for improving generation models via Reinforcement Learning (RL), yet the RM scaling paradigm in visual generation remains largely unexplored. It primarily due to fundamental limitations in existing…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-11 Jie Wu , Yu Gao , Zilyu Ye , Ming Li , Liang Li , Hanzhong Guo , Jie Liu , Zeyue Xue , Xiaoxia Hou , Wei Liu , Yan Zeng , Weilin Huang

Reinforcement learning (RL) often struggles with reward misalignment, where agents optimize given rewards but fail to exhibit the desired behaviors. This arises when the reward function incentivizes proxy behaviors misaligned with the true…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Mohammad Saif Nazir , Chayan Banerjee

Finding optimal policies which maximize long term rewards of Markov Decision Processes requires the use of dynamic programming and backward induction to solve the Bellman optimality equation. However, many real-world problems require…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-10 Mridul Agarwal , Vaneet Aggarwal

Reward design is a fundamental problem in reinforcement learning (RL). A misspecified or poorly designed reward can result in low sample efficiency and undesired behaviors. In this paper, we propose the idea of programmatic reward design,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-10 Weichao Zhou , Wenchao Li

We study the theoretical aspects of Reinforced Language Models (RLMs) from a bi-objective optimization perspective. Specifically, we consider the RLMs as a Pareto optimization problem that maximizes the two conflicting objectives, i.e.,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-27 Changhun Lee , Chiehyeon Lim

Reinforcement learning agents learn from rewards, but humans can uniquely assign value to novel, abstract outcomes in a goal-dependent manner. However, this flexibility is cognitively costly, making learning less efficient. Here, we propose…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2025-09-11 Gaia Molinaro , Anne G. E. Collins

The goal of inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is to infer a reward function that explains the behavior of an agent performing a task. The assumption that most approaches make is that the demonstrated behavior is near-optimal. In many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-20 Luis Haug , Ivan Ovinnikov , Eugene Bykovets

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is computationally challenging, with common approaches requiring the solution of multiple reinforcement learning (RL) sub-problems. This work motivates the use of potential-based reward shaping to reduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-19 Lauren H. Cooke , Harvey Klyne , Edwin Zhang , Cassidy Laidlaw , Milind Tambe , Finale Doshi-Velez

Resource allocation plays a critical role in minimizing cycle time and improving the efficiency of business processes. Recently, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has emerged as a powerful technique to optimize resource allocation policies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Jeroen Middelhuis , Zaharah Bukhsh , Ivo Adan , Remco Dijkman

Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) provides a way to learn high-performance policies in environments where the reward signal is hard to specify, avoiding heuristic and time-consuming reward design. However, PbRL can suffer from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-02 Chenyang Cao , Miguel Rogel-García , Mohamed Nabail , Xueqian Wang , Nicholas Rhinehart

The problem of inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is relevant to a variety of tasks including value alignment and robot learning from demonstration. Despite significant algorithmic contributions in recent years, IRL remains an ill-posed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-18 Sreejith Balakrishnan , Quoc Phong Nguyen , Bryan Kian Hsiang Low , Harold Soh

One obstacle to applying reinforcement learning algorithms to real-world problems is the lack of suitable reward functions. Designing such reward functions is difficult in part because the user only has an implicit understanding of the task…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-20 Jan Leike , David Krueger , Tom Everitt , Miljan Martic , Vishal Maini , Shane Legg

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for enhancing image editing and text-to-image (T2I) generation. However, current reward models, which act as critics during RL, often suffer from hallucinations and assign…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Xiangyu Zhao , Peiyuan Zhang , Junming Lin , Tianhao Liang , Yuchen Duan , Shengyuan Ding , Changyao Tian , Yuhang Zang , Junchi Yan , Xue Yang

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities, yet their performance is often capped by the coarse nature of existing alignment techniques. A critical bottleneck remains the lack of effective reward models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Zicheng Kong , Dehua Ma , Zhenbo Xu , Alven Yang , Yiwei Ru , Haoran Wang , Zixuan Zhou , Fuqing Bie , Liuyu Xiang , Huijia Wu , Jian Zhao , Zhaofeng He

We study a class of constrained reinforcement learning (RL) problems in which multiple constraint specifications are not identified before training. It is challenging to identify appropriate constraint specifications due to the undefined…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-01-02 Dongsheng Ding , Zhengyan Huan , Alejandro Ribeiro

Large language models are typically aligned with human preferences by optimizing $\textit{reward models}$ (RMs) fitted to human feedback. However, human preferences are multi-faceted, and it is increasingly common to derive reward from a…

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