arXiv:2607. 03453v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inference-time alignment methods, such as Best-of-$N$, offer a flexible alternative to training-based alignment by using reward models to select high-quality responses generated by a reference LLM.
By Eric Lei, Hsiang Hsu, Chun-Fu Chen
arXiv:2607. 03248v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The alignment of large language models with human preferences is commonly achieved through Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback or Direct Preference Optimization.
By Jialiang Wang, Xianming Liu, Xiong Zhou, Hui Liu, Haoliang Li
arXiv:2607. 02781v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inference-time alignment steers a frozen language model during decoding using auxiliary reward signals, avoiding the cost of repeated weight updates.
By Yaswanth Chittepu, Ativ Joshi, Sohini Chintala, Scott Niekum
arXiv:2506. 12529v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) entails a variety of approaches for aligning models with human intent to alleviate the burden of reward engineering.
By Sara Rajaram, R. James Cotton, Fabian H. Sinz
arXiv:2609.08082v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Preference-based fine-tuning methods such as RLHF and DPO require substantial compute and large preference datasets. They also need direct access to th...
By Hadi Hosseini, Debmalya Mandal, Duohan Zhang
The paper introduces Stackelberg Alignment, a leader‑follower framework that lets a pool of language models collaborate and improve by learning from each other’s responses. An EXP3 bandit leader adaptively selects instructions based on difficulty and discriminability, while the models act as followers, evaluating peers and learning via DPO or GRPO with Elo‑style reputation weighting and opponent matching. Experiments on diverse benchmarks show that this adaptive curriculum outperforms static baselines by up to 12‑25% and improves multi‑LLM evolution.
By Christina Hahn, Shangbin Feng, Dean Light, Swastik Roy, Hila Gonen, Yulia Tsvetkov
arXiv:2606. 09635v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Ensuring the reliability of Large Language Models (LLMs) under distribution drift requires inference-time adaptation.
By Hankun Lin, Ruqi Zhang
arXiv:2601.08777v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Aligning large language models (LLMs) to serve users with heterogeneous and potentially conflicting preferences is a central challenge for pe...
By Yang Cai, Weiqiang Zheng
arXiv:2602. 02572v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: 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.
By Haichuan Wang, Tao Lin, Lingkai Kong, Ce Li, Hezi Jiang, Milind Tambe
arXiv:2609.21899v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Best-of-$n$ (BoN) sampling is a simple yet effective inference-time alignment method, but hard maximization provides only coarse control over the trade...
By Yanxiao Liu, Sicheng Wan, Deniz G\"und\"uz
The paper introduces Adaptive Local Relational Alignment (ALRA), a logit‑based knowledge distillation method for autoregressive language models that combines student‑generated token proposals with teacher guidance at each prediction position. ALRA dynamically selects the number of candidate tokens based on the teacher’s probability spread, uses Adaptive Local Divergence to match both mass and relative token distributions, and applies Student‑Weighted Pairwise Relational Alignment to focus on high‑probability token pairs. Experiments on The Pile show that 200M‑ and 500M‑parameter students trained with ALRA outperform the best baseline by roughly 1 percentage point and surpass pre‑training without distillation by over 2 percentage points on nine zero‑shot benchmarks.
By Quang Hoang Trung, Quang Huu Hieu, Nguyen Van Hoang Phuc, Vo Nguyen Le Duy
The paper introduces Gradient-Aligned Reward (GAR), a reinforcement learning technique that uses truncated backpropagation to generate a compact gradient vector for each rollout and compares it to an expert-anchor gradient via cosine similarity. This dense, reasoning-aware reward improves large language model chain-of-thought reasoning on math benchmarks and transfers to other tasks without domain‑specific data, while adding less than 9% computational overhead. GAR outperforms existing baselines such as GRPO on Qwen3-4B and Qwen3-8B models.
By Leqi Zheng, Jinbo Su, Fang Niu, Chaokun Wang, Weiping Wang, Jiajun Zhang, Shannan Yan, Jie Wu, Zhaolu Kang, Rong Fu, Hang Zhang