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Oral Session

Oral 3B Reinforcement Learning: RLHF and Post-training

HALL B2
Tue 7 Jul 6 p.m. PDT — 7 p.m. PDT
Abstract:
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Tue 7 July 18:00 - 18:15 PDT

Mitigating Reward Hacking in RLHF via Bayesian Non-negative Reward Modeling

Zhibin Duan ⋅ Guowei Rong ⋅ Zhuo Li ⋅ Bo Chen ⋅ Mingyuan Zhou ⋅ Dandan Guo

Reward models learned from human preferences are central to aligning large language models (LLMs) via reinforcement learning from human feedback, yet they are often vulnerable to reward hacking due to noisy annotations and systematic biases such as response length or style. We propose Bayesian Non-Negative Reward Model (BNRM), a principled reward modeling framework that integrates non-negative factor analysis into Bradley–Terry (BT) preference model.BNRM represents rewards through a sparse, non-negative latent factor generative process that operates at two complementary levels: instance-specific latent variables induce disentangled reward representations, while sparsity over global latent factors acts as an implicit debiasing mechanism that suppresses spurious correlations. Together, this disentanglement-then-debiasing structure enables robust uncertainty-aware reward learning. To scale BNRM to modern LLMs, we develop an amortized variational inference network conditioned on deep model representations, allowing efficient end-to-end training. Extensive empirical results demonstrate that BNRM substantially mitigates reward over-optimization, improves robustness under distribution shifts, and yields more interpretable reward decompositions than strong baselines.

Tue 7 July 18:15 - 18:30 PDT

DR Tulu: Reinforcement Learning with Evolving Rubrics for Deep Research

Rulin Shao ⋅ Akari Asai ⋅ Shannon Shen ⋅ Hamish Ivison ⋅ Varsha Kishore ⋅ Jingming Zhuo ⋅ Xinran Zhao ⋅ Molly Park ⋅ Samuel Finlayson ⋅ David Sontag ⋅ Tyler Murray ⋅ Sewon Min ⋅ Pradeep Dasigi ⋅ Luca Soldaini ⋅ Faeze Brahman ⋅ Scott Yih ⋅ Sherry Wu ⋅ Luke Zettlemoyer ⋅ Yoon Kim ⋅ Hannaneh Hajishirzi ⋅ Pang Wei Koh

Deep research agents perform multi-step research to produce long-form, well-attributed answers. However, most open deep research agents are trained on easily verifiable short-form QA tasks via reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards, which does not extend to realistic long-form tasks. We address this with Reinforcement Learning with Evolving Rubrics (RLER), where rubrics are constructed and maintained to co-evolve with the policy model during training. This allows the rubrics to incorporate newly explored information from search and contrasting model responses, enabling better fact checking and more discriminative on-policy feedback. Using RLER, we develop Deep Research Tulu (DR Tulu-8B), the first fully open model that is directly trained for open-ended, long-form deep research. Across four long-form deep research benchmarks in science, healthcare, and general domains, DR Tulu-8B substantially outperforms existing open deep research agents (by 15.6% over Tongyi DR on average) and matches or exceeds proprietary deep research agents (by 0.7% over OpenAI DR on average), while being significantly smaller and cheaper per query (1000x cheaper than OpenAI DR per query).

Tue 7 July 18:30 - 18:45 PDT

Simultaneous Speech-to-Speech Translation Without Aligned Data

Tom Labiausse ⋅ Romain Fabre ⋅ Yannick Estève ⋅ Alexandre Défossez ⋅ Neil Zeghidour

Simultaneous speech translation requires translating source speech into a target language in real-time while handling non-monotonic word dependencies. Traditional approaches rely on supervised training with word-level aligned data, which is difficult to collect at scale and thus depends on synthetic alignments using language-specific heuristics that are suboptimal. We propose Hibiki-Zero, which eliminates the need for word-level alignments entirely. This fundamentally simplifies the training pipeline and enables seamless scaling to diverse languages with varying grammatical structures, removing the bottleneck of designing language-specific alignment heuristics. We first train on sentence-level aligned data to learn speech translation at high latency, then apply a novel reinforcement learning strategy using GRPO to optimize latency while preserving translation quality. Hibiki-Zero achieves state-of-the-art performance in translation accuracy, latency, voice transfer, and naturalness across four X-to-English tasks. Moreover, we demonstrate that our model can be adapted to support a new input language with less than 1000h of speech. We provide examples, model weights, inference code and we release a benchmark containing 45h of multilingual data for speech translation evaluation.

Tue 7 July 18:45 - 19:00 PDT

Video-Based Optimal Transport for Feedback-Efficient Offline Preference-Based Reinforcement Learning

Minh-Tung Luu ⋅ Hwanhee Kim ⋅ Younghwan Lee ⋅ Chang D. Yoo

Conveying complex objectives to reinforcement learning (RL) agents often requires meticulous reward engineering. Preference-based RL (PbRL) offers a promising alternative by learning reward functions from human feedback, but its scalability is hindered by high labeling costs. Inspired by advances in Video Foundation Models (ViFMs), we present Video-based Optimal Transport Preference (VOTP), a semi-supervised framework that learns effective reward functions from only a handful of labels. By leveraging optimal transport to align visual trajectories within the rich representation space of ViFMs, VOTP effectively generates high-fidelity pseudo-labels for large amounts of unlabeled data, substantially reducing human supervision. Extensive experiments across locomotion and manipulation benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of VOTP, which outperforms state-of-the-art offline PbRL methods under limited feedback budgets. We also showcase the robustness of VOTP in the presence of visual distractors and validate its utility on real robotic tasks, where it learns meaningful rewards with minimal human input.