Chain-of-thought prompting, by including intermediate reasoning steps in few-shot examples, elicits strong reasoning abilities in large language models on arithmetic, commonsense, and symbolic tasks.
super hub Canonical reference
Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback
Canonical reference. 93% of citing Pith papers cite this work as background.
223
Pith papers citing it
Background
93% of classified citations
abstract
Making language models bigger does not inherently make them better at following a user's intent. For example, large language models can generate outputs that are untruthful, toxic, or simply not helpful to the user. In other words, these models are not aligned with their users. In this paper, we show an avenue for aligning language models with user intent on a wide range of tasks by fine-tuning with human feedback. Starting with a set of labeler-written prompts and prompts submitted through the OpenAI API, we collect a dataset of labeler demonstrations of the desired model behavior, which we use to fine-tune GPT-3 using supervised learning. We then collect a dataset of rankings of model outputs, which we use to further fine-tune this supervised model using reinforcement learning from human feedback. We call the resulting models InstructGPT. In human evaluations on our prompt distribution, outputs from the 1.3B parameter InstructGPT model are preferred to outputs from the 175B GPT-3, despite having 100x fewer parameters. Moreover, InstructGPT models show improvements in truthfulness and reductions in toxic output generation while having minimal performance regressions on public NLP datasets. Even though InstructGPT still makes simple mistakes, our results show that fine-tuning with human feedback is a promising direction for aligning language models with human intent.
hub tools
citation-role summary
background 54
method 1
other 1
citation-polarity summary
claims ledger
- abstract Making language models bigger does not inherently make them better at following a user's intent. For example, large language models can generate outputs that are untruthful, toxic, or simply not helpful to the user. In other words, these models are not aligned with their users. In this paper, we show an avenue for aligning language models with user intent on a wide range of tasks by fine-tuning with human feedback. Starting with a set of labeler-written prompts and prompts submitted through the OpenAI API, we collect a dataset of labeler demonstrations of the desired model behavior, which we u
authors
co-cited works
representative citing papers
RefusalBench shows strict refusal rates fail to rank frontier LLMs correctly on biological safety, with provider effects and partial-compliance patterns that binary metrics miss.
Prompt injection attacks can self-replicate across LLM agents in multi-agent systems, enabling data theft, misinformation, and system disruption while propagating silently.
ORPO performs preference alignment during supervised fine-tuning via a monolithic odds ratio penalty, allowing 7B models to outperform larger state-of-the-art models on alignment benchmarks.
DSPy compiles short declarative programs into LM pipelines that self-optimize and outperform both standard few-shot prompting and expert-written chains on math, retrieval, and QA tasks.
Generative agents with memory streams, reflection, and planning using LLMs exhibit believable individual and emergent social behaviors in a simulated town.
An unsupervised technique extracts latent yes-no knowledge from language model activations by locating a direction that satisfies logical consistency properties, outperforming zero-shot accuracy by 4% on average across models and datasets.
Language models generate robot policy code from natural language commands via few-shot prompting, enabling spatial-geometric reasoning, generalization, and precise control on real robots.
Low-resource safety failures are action failures because the harmfulness representation transfers but the decision calibration does not; this is fixed by recalibrating a high-resource gate with 1-4 target-language examples.
EST-PRM stress-tests five PRM models on 4,687 reasoning chains from MATH-500, GSM8K, and PRMBench using three label-preserving transformations and reports model-specific vulnerability patterns.
Introduces (ε,q,t,A)-behavioral indistinguishability and shows via Qwen/Llama experiments that LoRA distillation boosts semantic similarity but leaves detectable behavioral differences under adversarial evaluation.
A hybrid first-order then zeroth-order optimization approach improves robustness of safety-aligned LLMs while preserving utility, with layer-wise sensitivity estimation for efficiency.
Distribution-Aware Reward optimizes LLM regression by treating rollouts as empirical predictive distributions and rewarding marginal improvements in CRPS quality rather than point accuracy alone.
The paper defines accidental meltdowns as unsafe agent behavior triggered by benign errors and reports that such meltdowns occur in 64.7% of evaluated rollouts across GPT, Grok, and Gemini agents.
DecisionBench supplies a fixed task suite, model pool, delegation interface, and multi-axis metrics to evaluate emergent delegation, showing similar quality across awareness conditions but 15-31 point headroom under perfect delegation.
PluRule is a new multimodal multilingual benchmark showing that state-of-the-art vision-language models perform only marginally better than a trivial baseline at detecting specific rule violations in pluralistic online communities.
Fast-Slow Training uses context optimization as fast weights alongside parameter updates as slow weights to achieve up to 3x better sample efficiency, higher performance, and less catastrophic forgetting than standard RL in continual LLM learning.
LLM multi-agent systems on lattices show bias-driven order-disorder crossovers instead of true phase transitions, with extracted effective couplings and fields serving as model-specific fingerprints.
Optimistic bilevel optimization with manifold lower-level minimizers is differentiable if the optimistic selection is unique, yielding a pseudoinverse hyper-gradient and a convergent HG-MS algorithm whose rate depends on intrinsic manifold dimension.
Pretrained language models are used as energy functions for Glauber dynamics in discrete text diffusion, improving generation quality over prior diffusion LMs and matching autoregressive models on benchmarks and reasoning tasks.
ContextualJailbreak uses evolutionary search over simulated primed dialogues with novel mutations to reach 90-100% attack success on open LLMs and transfers to some closed frontier models at 15-90% rates.
VAnim creates open-domain text-to-SVG animations via sparse state updates on a persistent DOM tree, identification-first planning, and rendering-aware RL with a new 134k-example benchmark.
Political bias audits of LLMs largely capture sycophantic accommodation to the inferred political identity of the asker rather than any fixed model ideology.
A new 7x4 taxonomy organizes agentic AI security threats by architectural layer and persistence timescale, revealing under-explored upper layers and missing defenses after surveying 116 papers.
citing papers explorer
-
EST-PRM: Stress-Testing Process Reward Models Before They Become Load-Bearing
EST-PRM stress-tests five PRM models on 4,687 reasoning chains from MATH-500, GSM8K, and PRMBench using three label-preserving transformations and reports model-specific vulnerability patterns.
-
Bounded Behavioral Indistinguishability for Black-Box LLM Distillation
Introduces (ε,q,t,A)-behavioral indistinguishability and shows via Qwen/Llama experiments that LoRA distillation boosts semantic similarity but leaves detectable behavioral differences under adversarial evaluation.
-
Distribution-Aware Reward: Reinforcement Learning over Predictive Distributions for LLM Regression
Distribution-Aware Reward optimizes LLM regression by treating rollouts as empirical predictive distributions and rewarding marginal improvements in CRPS quality rather than point accuracy alone.
-
Learning, Fast and Slow: Towards LLMs That Adapt Continually
Fast-Slow Training uses context optimization as fast weights alongside parameter updates as slow weights to achieve up to 3x better sample efficiency, higher performance, and less catastrophic forgetting than standard RL in continual LLM learning.
-
Leveraging Pretrained Language Models as Energy Functions for Glauber Dynamics Text Diffusion
Pretrained language models are used as energy functions for Glauber dynamics in discrete text diffusion, improving generation quality over prior diffusion LMs and matching autoregressive models on benchmarks and reasoning tasks.
-
Discrete Tilt Matching
Discrete Tilt Matching recasts dLLM fine-tuning as state-level matching of tilted local unmasking posteriors, producing a stable weighted cross-entropy loss that improves Sudoku and Countdown performance when applied to LLaDA-8B-Instruct.
-
S-GRPO: Unified Post-Training for Large Vision-Language Models
S-GRPO unifies SFT and RL for LVLMs via conditional ground-truth injection that supplies a maximal-reward anchor when group exploration fails completely.
-
Reinforcement Learning via Value Gradient Flow
VGF solves behavior-regularized RL by transporting particles from a reference distribution to the value-induced optimal policy via discrete value-guided gradient flow.
-
CapTrack: Multifaceted Evaluation of Forgetting in LLM Post-Training
CapTrack shows post-training causes drift beyond facts, with instruction fine-tuning producing stronger behavioral changes than preference optimization across model families.
-
Scaling up Test-Time Compute with Latent Reasoning: A Recurrent Depth Approach
A recurrent-depth architecture enables language models to improve reasoning performance by iterating computation in latent space, achieving gains equivalent to much larger models on benchmarks.
-
Medusa: Simple LLM Inference Acceleration Framework with Multiple Decoding Heads
Medusa augments LLMs with multiple decoding heads and tree-based attention to predict and verify several tokens in parallel, yielding 2.2-3.6x inference speedup via two fine-tuning regimes.
-
Let's Verify Step by Step
Process supervision significantly outperforms outcome supervision for training models on the MATH dataset, achieving 78% accuracy on a representative test subset with active learning and a released 800k step-label dataset.
-
RASFT: Rollout-Adaptive Supervised Fine-Tuning for Reasoning
RASFT is an adaptive SFT method that strengthens or relaxes expert imitation per problem based on on-policy rollout solvability and adds clipped reference-policy ratio to limit drift, reporting better results than standard SFT and RL on math and code benchmarks.
-
Annealed Softmax Greedy in Many-Armed Bayesian Bandits
Annealed softmax greedy achieves Õ(m + T/m) Bayes regret (Õ(√T) at m=Θ(√T)) in many-armed Bayesian Bernoulli bandits under linear upper-tail prior condition, matching empirical-mean greedy.
-
Understanding Goal Generalisation in Sequential Reinforcement Learning
Empirical analysis of over 100 sequential RL training pipelines across 250+ OOD environments finds salient features drive generalization and early goals persist, with latent policy gradients simulating latent variable evolution to predict OOD behavior from training history.
-
When Are Teacher Tokens Reliable? Position-Weighted On-Policy Self-Distillation for Reasoning
Position-Weighted On-Policy Self-Distillation (PW-OPSD) weights later tokens more heavily after a diagnostic shows position predicts teacher reliability better than entropy, yielding +1.0 and +1.1 Avg@12 gains on AIME 2024/2025.
-
TimeSRL: Generalizable Time-Series Behavioral Modeling via Semantic RL-Tuned LLMs -- A Case Study in Mental Health
TimeSRL uses semantic abstractions from time-series data optimized via reinforcement learning to achieve better cross-dataset generalization than standard ML or LLM baselines in mental health prediction.
-
Reinforcing Human Behavior Simulation via Verbal Feedback
DITTO uses RL with verbal feedback to train LLMs for human behavior simulation, reporting 36% average gains over base models and outperforming GPT-5.4 on 6 of 10 SOUL benchmark tasks.
-
Spectral Unforgetting: Post-Hoc Recovery of Damaged Capabilities Without Retraining
DG-Hard uses Donoho-Gavish hard thresholding on the fine-tuning weight delta to separate task-aligned signal from noise-like residual, recovering damaged capabilities while preserving target-task gains.
-
Resolving Action Bottleneck: Agentic Reinforcement Learning Informed by Token-Level Energy
ActFocus resolves the action bottleneck in agentic RL by reweighting token gradients toward action tokens using observed reward variance and an energy-based uncertainty term, outperforming PPO and GRPO by up to 65 percentage points.
-
Early Data Exposure Improves Robustness to Subsequent Fine-Tuning
Early mixing of post-training data into pretraining improves retention of acquired capabilities after subsequent fine-tuning in language models.
-
Trust the Batch, On- or Off-Policy: Adaptive Policy Optimization for RL Post-Training
A new RL objective adapts trust-region and off-policy handling automatically via normalized effective sample size of batch policy ratios, matching tuned baselines without new hyperparameters.
-
Rotation-Preserving Supervised Fine-Tuning
RPSFT improves the in-domain versus out-of-domain performance trade-off during LLM supervised fine-tuning by penalizing rotations in pretrained singular subspaces as a proxy for loss-sensitive directions.
-
Experience Sharing in Mutual Reinforcement Learning for Heterogeneous Language Models
Mutual Reinforcement Learning allows heterogeneous LLMs to exchange experience through mechanisms like Peer Rollout Pooling, Cross-Policy GRPO Advantage Sharing, and Success-Gated Transfer, with outcome-level sharing identified as favorable on the stability-support trade-off.
-
Why Does Agentic Safety Fail to Generalize Across Tasks?
Agentic safety fails to generalize across tasks because the task-to-safe-controller mapping has a higher Lipschitz constant than the task-to-controller mapping alone, as proven in linear-quadratic control and demonstrated in quadcopter and LLM experiments.
-
Power Distribution Bridges Sampling, Self-Reward RL, and Self-Distillation
The power distribution is the target of power sampling, the closed-form solution to self-reward KL-regularized RL, and the basis for power self-distillation that matches sampling performance at lower cost.
-
A Meta Reinforcement Learning Approach to Goals-Based Wealth Management
MetaRL pre-trained on GBWM problems delivers near-optimal dynamic strategies in 0.01s achieving 97.8% of DP optimal utility and handles larger problems where DP fails.
-
Diversity in Large Language Models under Supervised Fine-Tuning
TOFU loss mitigates the narrowing of generative diversity in LLMs after supervised fine-tuning by addressing neglect of low-frequency patterns and forgetting of prior knowledge.
-
Dictionary-Aligned Concept Control for Safeguarding Multimodal LLMs
DACO curates a 15,000-concept dictionary from 400K image-caption pairs and uses it to initialize an SAE that enables granular, concept-specific steering of MLLM activations, raising safety scores on MM-SafetyBench and JailBreakV while preserving general capabilities.
-
Hindsight-Anchored Policy Optimization: Turning Failure into Feedback in Sparse Reward Settings
HAPO adds a hindsight-anchored SSI operator with Thompson gating to GRPO-style RLVR, achieving asymptotic consistency that recovers unbiased on-policy gradients as the policy improves.
-
On the optimization dynamics of RLVR: Gradient gap and step size thresholds
The paper defines a Gradient Gap for RLVR policy gradients and proves a sharp step-size threshold below which training converges and above which it collapses, with predictions for length and success-rate scaling validated in simulations and on Qwen2.5-Math-7B.
-
Improving Inverse Folding for Peptide Design with Diversity-regularized Direct Preference Optimization
Diversity-regularized DPO fine-tuning of ProteinMPNN improves structural similarity scores by at least 8% over base model and sequence diversity by up to 20% over standard DPO for peptide inverse folding on OpenFold structures.
-
Zephyr: Direct Distillation of LM Alignment
Zephyr-7B achieves state-of-the-art chat benchmark results among 7B models by distilling alignment via dDPO on AI feedback preferences, surpassing the 70B Llama-2-Chat model on MT-Bench with no human data required.
-
Jailbreaking Black Box Large Language Models in Twenty Queries
PAIR uses an attacker LLM to iteratively craft effective jailbreak prompts for black-box target LLMs in fewer than 20 queries.
-
SmoothLLM: Defending Large Language Models Against Jailbreaking Attacks
SmoothLLM mitigates jailbreaking attacks on LLMs by randomly perturbing multiple copies of a prompt at the character level and aggregating the outputs to detect adversarial inputs.
-
Training Diffusion Models with Reinforcement Learning
DDPO uses policy gradients on the denoising process to optimize diffusion models for arbitrary rewards like human feedback or compressibility.
-
Aligning Text-to-Image Models using Human Feedback
A three-stage fine-tuning process uses human ratings to train a reward model and then improves text-to-image alignment by maximizing reward-weighted likelihood.
-
Solving math word problems with process- and outcome-based feedback
On GSM8K, outcome-based supervision achieves similar final-answer error rates to process-based with less labeling, but process-based or learned reward models are needed to reach 3.4% reasoning error among correct solutions.
-
Large Language Models Are Human-Level Prompt Engineers
APE generates instruction candidates via LLM and selects the best by zero-shot performance of a second LLM, matching or beating human prompts on 19 of 24 NLP tasks.
-
Scaling Laws and Interpretability of Learning from Repeated Data
Repeating 0.1% of training data 100 times degrades an 800M parameter model's performance to that of a 400M model by damaging copying mechanisms and induction heads associated with generalization.
-
Automating Formal Verification with Reinforcement Learning and Recursive Inference
RLVR training raises verified Dafny pass rates from 9.7% to 31.1% on a filtered benchmark while a Lean proof scaffold lifts success from 46.2% to 69.2% on a pilot set and solves 7 of 42 prior unsolved tasks.
-
PREFINE: Preference-Based Implicit Reward and Cost Fine-Tuning for Safety Alignment
PREFINE adapts Direct Preference Optimization to trajectory-level preferences in RL for joint reward retention and safety alignment in continuous domains.
-
AGPO: Adaptive Group Policy Optimization with Dual Statistical Feedback
AGPO adaptively sets trust-region size and exploration temperature from group reward dispersion, entropy, and KL drift, yielding higher scores than PPO and GRPO on nine math benchmarks under fixed token budget.
-
D$^2$Evo: Dual Difficulty-Aware Self-Evolution for Data-Efficient Reinforcement Learning
D²Evo mines medium-difficulty anchors from the current model, trains a Questioner to generate matching questions, and jointly optimizes Solver and Questioner for progressive gains, outperforming baselines on math reasoning with under 2K real samples.
-
Beyond Distribution Sharpening: The Importance of Task Rewards
Task-reward reinforcement learning yields robust gains on math benchmarks for models like Llama-3.2-3B while distribution sharpening alone delivers only limited and unstable improvements.
-
Rethinking Expert Trajectory Utilization in LLM Post-training for Mathematical Reasoning
Sequential SFT followed by RL, guided by the Plasticity-Ceiling Framework, achieves higher performance ceilings in LLM mathematical reasoning than synchronized methods by optimizing data scale and transition timing.
-
LLM4Delay: Flight Delay Prediction via Cross-Modality Adaptation of Large Language Models and Aircraft Trajectory Representation
LLM4Delay improves flight delay prediction accuracy by using instance-level projection to adapt LLMs for integrating textual aeronautical information with multiple aircraft trajectories.
-
Polychromic Objectives for Reinforcement Learning
Introduces polychromic objectives adapted into PPO via vine sampling and modified advantages, showing higher success rates and better coverage under perturbations on BabyAI, Minigrid, and algorithmic tasks.
-
Failure Modes of Maximum Entropy RLHF
Derives SimPO from MaxEnt RL and reports that MaxEnt RL in online RLHF exhibits frequent overoptimization and unstable KL dynamics across scales, unlike stable KL-constrained baselines.
-
Depth-Breadth Synergy in RLVR: Unlocking LLM Reasoning Gains with Adaptive Exploration
DARS adaptively increases rollouts on hard problems in RLVR to improve Pass@K, and when paired with batch scaling for breadth, achieves gains in both Pass@K and Pass@1 by treating depth and breadth as complementary exploration dimensions.