arXiv Machine Learning

Your Self-Play Algorithm is Secretly an Adversarial Imitator: Understanding LLM Self-Play through the Lens of Imitation Learning

arXiv:2602. 01357v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Self-play post-training methods has emerged as an effective approach for finetuning large language models and turn the weak language model into strong language model without preference data.

arXiv Machine Learning
5d ago

Learning Robust Social Strategies with Large Language Models

The paper investigates how large language models (LLMs) can be trained to cooperate in multi‑agent social dilemmas. It shows that standard reinforcement learning often leads LLM agents to defect and exploit others, even when they have cooperative priors. By adapting the Advantage Alignment algorithm and introducing a group‑relative baseline, the authors fine‑tune LLMs to achieve higher collective payoffs and resist exploitation, and they present a new Trust‑and‑Split environment that requires natural language communication for optimal outcomes.

By Dereck Piche, Mohammed Muqeeth, Milad Aghajohari, Juan Duque, Michael Noukhovitch, Aaron Courville
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 22

Inverse RL Helps Align AI by Imitating Humans

The paper introduces PARED, an approach that uses inverse reinforcement learning to derive an explicit, interpretable reward from expert demonstrations. By training a lightweight discriminator on response-level features, PARED can guide both inference-time reranking and on-policy reinforcement learning, improving alignment for models that have not undergone supervised fine-tuning and further refining those that have. The method also supports contextual alignment, enabling a single policy to adapt its responses to different audience preferences.

By Micha{\l} Wili\'nski, Liu Leqi, Chirag Nagpal
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 7

Chasing Moving Targets with Online Self-Play Reinforcement Learning for Safer Language Models

arXiv:2506. 07468v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Conventional large language model (LLM) safety alignment relies on a reactive, disjoint loop: attackers exploit a static model, then defenders patch exposed vulnerabilities.

By Mickel Liu, Liwei Jiang, Yancheng Liang, Simon Shaolei Du, Yejin Choi, Tim Althoff, Natasha Jaques
arXiv AI
Jun 2

S-SPPO: Semantic-Calibrated Self-Play Preference Optimization

arXiv:2606. 01561v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences is often formulated via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO).

By Xiwen Chen, Wenhui Zhu, Jingjing Wang, Peijie Qiu, Zhipeng Wang, Huayu Li, ZhengXiao He, Xuanzhao Dong, Prayag Tiwari, Mingkun Xu, Yujian Xiong, Feng Luo, Abolfazl Razi, Brendan Hogan Rappazzo, Anderson Schneider, Yuriy Nevmyvaka