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:2602.13551v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Reward models (RMs) play a central role throughout the language model (LM) pipeline, particularly in non-verifiable domains. However, the dominant...
By Yike Wang, Faeze Brahman, Shangbin Feng, Teng Xiao, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Yulia Tsvetkov
arXiv:2606. 07520v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Instruction Following (IF) is a core capability of LLMs, requiring strict adherence to diverse constraints, ranging from verifiable ones (e.
By Yirong Zeng, Yufei Liu, Xiao Ding, Yutai Hou, Yuxian Wang, Wu Ning, Haonan Song, Dandan Tu, Qixun Zhang, Yuxiang He, Bibo Cai, Ting Liu
arXiv:2609.36202v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Gradient-based reward guidance provides a flexible way to use downstream reward models to control masked diffusion language models at inference time....
By Darshan Thaker, Lachlan Ewen MacDonald, Ren\'e Vidal
arXiv:2510. 26219v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Test-time alignment of large language models (LLMs) attracts attention because fine-tuning of LLMs requires high computational costs.
By Sekitoshi Kanai, Tsukasa Yoshida, Hiroshi Takahashi, Haru Kuroki, Kazumune Hashimoto
arXiv:2509. 26169v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Alignment of large language models remains a central challenge in natural language processing.
By Fr\'ed\'eric Berdoz, Luca A. Lanzend\"orfer, Ren\'e Caky, Roger Wattenhofer
arXiv:2606. 04807v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mitigating social bias in Large Language Models (LLMs) presents a distinct alignment challenge: unlike verifiable tasks, bias lacks a single ground truth, creating a high-variance, subjective reward landscape.
By Saket Reddy, Ke Yang, ChengXiang Zhai
arXiv:2603. 14504v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Optimizing the noise samples of diffusion and flow models is an increasingly popular approach to align these models to target rewards at inference time.
By Niklas Schweiger, Daniel Cremers, Karnik Ram
arXiv:2608.30194v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Diffusion models have recently advanced text-to-video (T2V) generation, yet they still struggle with fine-grained compositional alignment, such as attr...
By Yujiang Pu, Yu Kong
Mitigating social bias in Large Language Models (LLMs) presents a distinct alignment challenge: unlike verifiable tasks, bias lacks a single ground truth, creating a high-variance, subjective reward landscape. Previous preference-based fine-tuning methods have major trade-offs: Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is limited by the lack of exploration inherent in offline training, while Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) can lead to training instability due to potentially unreliable critic estimates.
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
arXiv:2604. 17415v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reward-based fine-tuning steers a pretrained diffusion or flow-based generative model toward higher-reward samples while remaining close to the pretrained model.
By Jeongjae Lee, Jinho Chang, Jeongsol Kim, Jong Chul Ye