arXiv AI

Evolutionary Guided Decoding: Iterative Value Refinement for LLMs

arXiv:2503. 02368v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While guided decoding, especially value-guided methods, has emerged as a cost-effective alternative for controlling language model outputs without re-training models, its effectiveness is limited by the accuracy of the value function.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 20

Token-Level Off-Policy Learning for Faithful Generation Under Distribution Shift

We propose Token-Level Off-Policy Labeling (TOPL), an off-policy training paradigm that reframes post-training as a token-level correctness prediction task. Our key intuition is that by training the model to distinguish good and bad tokens in a response, we naturally guide the model towards generating good tokens, while avoiding the pitfalls that come with directly training the model to generate off-policy tokens.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

Retrieval-augmented Decoding for Improving Truthfulness in Open-ended Generation

The paper introduces Retrieval-Augmented Decoding (RAD), a decoding-time method that improves the truthfulness of large language models without retraining. RAD uses a small reference set of up to ten annotated examples to build a grounding space of context embeddings and next-token logits, which it retrieves and aggregates during inference to shape the model’s output. Experiments on four open-ended generation benchmarks and four different LLMs show that RAD consistently outperforms strong baselines and generalizes well across tasks.

By Manh Nguyen, Sunil Gupta, Hung Le
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Is Human Annotation Necessary? Iterative MBR Distillation for Error Span Detection in Machine Translation

The paper introduces Iterative MBR Distillation for Error Span Detection (ESD) in machine translation, a self‑evolution framework that replaces human annotations with pseudo‑labels generated by a large language model. By iteratively applying Minimum Bayes Risk decoding, the method produces high‑quality error spans without costly human effort. Experiments on WMT Metrics Shared Task datasets show that models trained solely on these pseudo‑labels outperform both unadapted baselines and supervised models trained on human data at system and span levels, while keeping sentence‑level performance competitive.

By Boxuan Lyu, Haiyue Song, Zhi Qu
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 21

Cultural Alignment in Large Language Models Using Soft Prompt Tuning

The paper proposes a method for culturally aligning large language models (LLMs) using soft prompt tuning optimized via Differential Evolution (DE). Unlike traditional fine‑tuning or reinforcement learning, this approach keeps model weights frozen and requires no preference data, instead leveraging aggregated survey scores from Hofstede's Value Survey Module (VSM13). Experiments on four countries and four instruction‑tuned models show that DE‑optimized prompts reduce cultural discrepancy, improve agreement with the World Values Survey, and are preferred in blinded pairwise evaluations by LLM judges.

By Reem I. Masoud, Martin Ferianc, Philip Treleaven, Miguel Rodrigues
arXiv AI
Jun 9

Rewrite to Translate, Translate to Reward: Reinforcement Learning for Source Rewriting in Machine Translation

arXiv:2606. 08011v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Although directly prompting off-the-shelf Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate meaning-preserving source rewrites can effectively enhance Machine Translation (MT) quality, doing so requires manually tuning prompts for different MT models.

By Boxuan Lyu, Haiyue Song, Zhi Qu, Hidetaka Kamigaito, Kotaro Funakoshi, Manabu Okumura
arXiv AI
Sep 7

Reinforcement Learning for improving Large Language Models' Catalan text simplification capabilities

The paper explores using reinforcement learning to enhance automatic text simplification for low‑resource languages, focusing on Catalan. It introduces a new reward function that blends the SARI metric with penalty terms, and applies Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to fine‑tune the IberianLLM‑7B‑Instruct model on the ASSET dataset. Post‑training, the model shows improved simplification performance on two Catalan benchmarks and reduces prior negative behaviors, though cross‑lingual transfer from English, Spanish, and Catalan translations of ASSET does not yield significant gains on an out‑of‑domain benchmark.

By Arnau Ayguad\'e Domingo, Stefan Bott, Horacio Saggion
arXiv AI
3d ago

GrammarRL: Effective Grammar-Constrained Decoding via Reinforcement Learning

GrammarRL introduces a label‑free reinforcement learning approach that adapts language models to grammar constraints without annotated data. It optimizes two self‑supervised rewards—direct and reverse—using a Reinforce Leave‑One‑Out objective over grammar‑constrained rollouts, and regularizes toward a frozen base model. Experiments on sign‑language gloss translation, hierarchical text classification, and named entity recognition with Llama models show consistent gains over constrained greedy decoding and competitive performance to beam search while keeping inference cost low.

By Gabriele Tuccio, Antonino Furnari, Aldo Gangemi, Misael Mongiov\`{\i}