REVIEW 9 cited by
Noise Contrastive Alignment of Language Models with Explicit Rewards
Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.
This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.
SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event
T0 review · schema-true
One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.
pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp
read the original abstract
User intentions are typically formalized as evaluation rewards to be maximized when fine-tuning language models (LMs). Existing alignment methods, such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), are mainly tailored for pairwise preference data where rewards are implicitly defined rather than explicitly given. In this paper, we introduce a general framework for LM alignment, leveraging Noise Contrastive Estimation (NCE) to bridge the gap in handling reward datasets explicitly annotated with scalar evaluations. Our framework comprises two parallel algorithms, NCA and InfoNCA, both enabling the direct extraction of an LM policy from reward data as well as preference data. Notably, we show that the DPO loss is a special case of our proposed InfoNCA objective under pairwise preference settings, thereby integrating and extending current alignment theories. By comparing NCA and InfoNCA, we demonstrate that the well-observed decreasing-likelihood trend of DPO/InfoNCA is caused by their focus on adjusting relative likelihood across different responses. In contrast, NCA optimizes the absolute likelihood for each response, thereby effectively preventing the chosen likelihood from decreasing. We evaluate our methods in both reward and preference settings with Mistral-8*7B and 7B models. Experiments suggest that InfoNCA/NCA surpasses various preference baselines when reward datasets are available. We also find NCA significantly outperforms DPO in complex reasoning tasks like math and coding.
Forward citations
Cited by 9 Pith papers
-
Test-Time Scaling via Error Localization
TTEL uses feedback-induced token probability drops to localize the first error in a failed reasoning trace and branch a new generation from that prefix, improving pass@k per token on coding and math benchmarks.
-
Multi-Turn On-Policy Distillation with Prefix Replay
ReOPD offline-distills multi-turn agentic LLMs via teacher-prefix replay plus step-decay sampling, matching online OPD accuracy at ≥4× speed with zero tool calls.
-
Vocabulary Hijacking in LVLMs: Unveiling Critical Attention Heads by Excluding Inert Tokens to Mitigate Hallucination
LVLMs show vocabulary hijacking by inert tokens that decode to hijacking anchors; HABI locates them, NHAR finds resilient heads, and HAVAE boosts those heads to cut hallucinations.
-
Process Reinforcement through Implicit Rewards
PRIME enables online process reward model updates in LLM RL using implicit rewards from rollouts and outcome labels, yielding 15.1% average gains on reasoning benchmarks and surpassing a stronger instruct model with 1...
-
Enhancing the Reasoning Ability of Multimodal Large Language Models via Mixed Preference Optimization
Mixed Preference Optimization with the MMPR dataset boosts multimodal CoT reasoning, lifting InternVL2-8B to 67.0 accuracy on MathVista (+8.7 points) and matching the 76B model.
-
Multi-Turn On-Policy Distillation with Prefix Replay
By replaying teacher prefixes with a step-decay schedule, multi-turn on-policy distillation can run without live environment interaction, matching or slightly beating online OPD accuracy.
-
Generating Place-Based Compromises Between Two Points of View
Empathic similarity feedback in prompts generates more acceptable compromises than chain-of-thought, and margin-based training on the resulting data lets smaller models produce them without ongoing empathy estimation.
-
The Hitchhiker's Guide to Agentic AI: From Foundations to Systems
A comprehensive reference book organizing existing techniques for agentic AI systems across LLM substrate, reasoning, agent design patterns, inter-agent coordination, and production deployment.
-
The Hitchhiker's Guide to Agentic AI: From Foundations to Systems
A survey-style reference book mapping the full agentic-AI stack from transformer internals to production deployment, with no new research result.
Discussion (0). Sign in to comment.