arXiv Machine Learning

Overcoming the Incentive Collapse Paradox

arXiv:2603. 27049v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AI-assisted task delegation is increasingly common, yet human effort in such systems is costly and typically unobserved.

arXiv AI
Sep 25

Human-AI-Powered Hypothesis Testing: Cost-Aware Selective AI Scoring and Sequential Human Escalation

The paper introduces a framework for hypothesis testing that combines inexpensive AI judgments with selective human verification to control type‑I and type‑II errors while minimizing cost. It derives an information‑theoretic lower bound on the minimum cost and proposes the SCALE policy, a sequential, cost‑aware strategy that adapts AI scoring and human escalation. SCALE is proven valid for finite samples and asymptotically matches the lower bound, achieving significant savings when both AI and human inputs are valuable.

By Dae Woong (David), Ham, Xuejun Zhao, Stefanus Jasin, Fenghua Yang
arXiv AI
Jun 3

Who Deserves the Reward? SHARP: Shapley Credit-based Optimization for Multi-Agent System

arXiv:2602. 08335v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) with external tools via multi-agent systems offers a promising new paradigm for decomposing and solving complex problems.

By Yanming Li, Xuelin Zhang, WenJie Lu, Ziye Tang, Maodong Wu, Haotian Luo, Tongtong Wu, Zijie Peng, Hongze Mi, Yibo Feng, Naiqiang Tan, Chao Huang, Lian Peng, Li Shen
arXiv AI
Jul 3

Adaptive Contracts for Cost-Effective AI Delegation

arXiv:2603. 17212v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: When organizations delegate text generation tasks to AI providers via pay-for-performance contracts, expected payments rise when evaluation is noisy.

By Eden Saig, Tamar Garbuz, Ariel D. Procaccia, Inbal Talgam-Cohen, Jamie Tucker-Foltz
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 23

Optimal Sequential Annotations for Off-Policy Evaluation

The paper proposes a method for allocating a limited budget of expert annotations to optimize the accuracy of off-policy evaluation in settings where rewards are missing or noisy. By deriving variance‑optimal annotation probabilities for sequential, forward‑monotone protocols, the authors provide a batch‑adaptive implementation that can be applied to real data. Experiments on casenotes from a homelessness services nonprofit and on human‑preference votes from LMArena demonstrate substantial reductions in RMSE—up to 65% for housing placement and 68% for progress toward a housing application—when using only 40% or more of the full annotation budget.

By Woojin Chae, Ezinne Nwankwo, Haitong Qin, Angela Zhou
arXiv AI
3d ago

Revisiting scaling laws for reward optimization

The paper presents a new scaling law for reward optimization in AI alignment, showing that performance scales as Θ(√min{log(M), K}), where M is the number of preference comparisons used to train a proxy reward model and K is the KL‑divergence budget relative to a reference policy. The authors derive this law using an information‑theoretic model, prove its tightness, and validate it with extensive experiments involving a 70B gold reward model and smaller proxy models (0.6B–4B). The empirical results demonstrate a strong fit (R² 97–99 %) across different model sizes, noise levels, and optimization methods, suggesting that reward optimization behaves like a simple selection task over IID Gaussian variables with noisy feedback.

By Ali Aouad, Aymane El Gadarri, Vivek F. Farias
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 29

Post-Training at the Edge of Detectability: A Game-Theoretic Approach to Fine-Tuning

Reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning is widely used in language model training to improve model performance on a target task while limiting drift from a reference policy. A standard way to balance this trade-off is via a KL-regularized RL objective, although this formulation does not by itself provide a principled way to set the regularization coefficient.