APLOT: Robust Reward Modeling via Adaptive Preference Learning with Optimal Transport (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that RLHF improves performance of Large Language Models . BT-based RMs struggle to distinguish between similar preference responses . |
| Approach: | They propose to enhance BT-based reward models by using an adaptive margin mechanism . they use semantic similarity and reward-predicted reward differences to adjust focus . |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms existing methods in both in-distribution and OOD settings. |
Similar Papers
Teach a Reward Model to Correct Itself: Reward Guided Adversarial Failure Discovery for Robust Reward Modeling (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing failure discovery methods rely on prior knowledge of preference attributes . Existing methods do not scale to new models or data. |
| Approach: | They propose a preference distribution agnostic procedure that uses the reward model itself to guide controlled decoding toward mis specified responses while preserving the underlying preference class. |
| Outcome: | The proposed procedure improves robustness without degrading reward quality across models. |
Act-Adaptive Margin: Dynamically Calibrating Reward Models for Subjective Ambiguity (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Feiteng Fang, Dingwei Chen, Xiang Huang, Ting-En Lin, Yuchuan Wu, Xiong Liu, Jing Ye, Ziqiang Liu, Haonan Zhang, Liang Zhu, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Min Yang, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to reward modeling in reinforcement learning tasks are limited when dealing with ambiguous preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose to use AAM to dynamically calibrate preference margins using the Bradley-Terry model's internal parameter knowledge to improve reward modeling in subjective tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves reward modeling by dynamically calibrating preference margins using the model’s internal parameter knowledge. |
PaTaRM: Bridging Pairwise and Pointwise Signals via Preference-Aware Task-Adaptive Reward Modeling (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing reward models lack generative and reasoning capabilities, resulting in poor performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a reward-aware task-adaptive reward model that enables pointwise training using readily available pairwise data via a novel Preference-Aware Reward mechanism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed reward model achieves an average relative improvement of 8.7% over the base models on RewardBench and RMBench. |
DARM: Distribution-Aware Reward Modeling by Alleviating Biases from Low Preference-Context Dependency Data (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Shaofan Liu, Guoqiang Zhang, Shihan Dou, Huiyuan Zheng, Yiming Zhou, Junjie Ye, Shaowen Wang, Shichun Liu, Jiazheng Zhang, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for training reward models are vulnerable to context neglect and degraded accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose distribution-aware reward modeling that augments the RM objective with a conditional mutual information regularizer that maximizes context and the predicted reward conditioned on the response. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance in RLHF and improves accuracy in other settings. |
Semi-Supervised Reward Modeling via Iterative Self-Training (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Reward models capture values and preferences of humans and are used in Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) Traditionally, training large language models relies on extensive human-annotated preference data, which poses significant challenges in terms of scalability and cost. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that enhances RM training using unlabeled data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves reward models without incurring additional labeling costs on unlabeled datasets. |
Adversarial Preference Optimization: Enhancing Your Alignment via RM-LLM Game (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for training large language models require additional annotations to adjust to shifted distributions. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm that allows LLMs and reward models to update alternatively via a min-max game to improve their alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves existing alignment baselines in terms of LLM helpfulness and harmlessness. |
DUAL RM: Beyond Rule-based Preference Reward Modeling via Meta-Reward (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Xiaobo Liang, Wanfu Wang, Qipeng Huang, Yuyang Ding, Zecheng Tang, Yixin Ji, Qianben Chen, Zhe Zhao, Kehai Chen, Juntao Li, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing preference-based reward modeling methods face a recursive dependency where each verifier requires a meta-verifier, leading to continuous and costly dependence on human annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual RM that couples discriminative and generative reward models under a non-parametric meta-reward. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves strong performance across major preference benchmarks and even when trained exclusively on language modality, it exhibits robust cross-modal transfer on Omni-RewardBench. |
Fine-Tuning Language Models with Reward Learning on Policy (2024.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is an effective approach to align large language models (LLMs) to human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that refines a reward model using policy samples to keep it on-distribution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art on three benchmark datasets showing that it can learn robust representations of policy samples. |
Interpretable Preferences via Multi-Objective Reward Modeling and Mixture-of-Experts (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is the primary method for aligning large language models with human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose to train an Absolute-Rating Multi-Objective Reward Model with multi-dimensional absolute-rating data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the LLM-as-a-judge method on RewardBench . it achieves state-of-the-art performance on the benchmark . |
MiCRo: Mixture Modeling and Context-aware Routing for Personalized Preference Learning (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing reward models assume a global reward function, limiting personalization and pluralistic alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages binary preference datasets to enhance personalized preference learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework captures diverse human preferences without fine-grained annotations and significantly improves personalized preference learning on downstream tasks. |