Sentence-level Reward Model can Generalize Better for Aligning LLM from Human Preference

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Qiu, Wenjie, Li, Yi-Chen, Zhang, Xuqin, Zhang, Tianyi, Zhang, Yihang, Zhang, Zongzhang, Yu, Yang
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866908403227426816
author Qiu, Wenjie
Li, Yi-Chen
Zhang, Xuqin
Zhang, Tianyi
Zhang, Yihang
Zhang, Zongzhang
Yu, Yang
author_facet Qiu, Wenjie
Li, Yi-Chen
Zhang, Xuqin
Zhang, Tianyi
Zhang, Yihang
Zhang, Zongzhang
Yu, Yang
contents Learning reward models from human preference datasets and subsequently optimizing language models via reinforcement learning has emerged as a fundamental paradigm for aligning LLMs with human preferences. The performance of the reward model plays a crucial role in the effectiveness of alignment. Previous reward models operate at a coarse-grained level, requiring the generation of a complete response to obtain a reward value. The sparse reward may present challenges for downstream reinforcement learning. While recent efforts have attempted to learn token-level reward models, the lack of explicit semantic information makes it difficult to model the credit of every individual token. In this paper, we propose assigning scores to every sentence, introducing an intermediate-grained reward model. By segmenting the complete response into sentences and applying differential operations to reward output at the start and end positions of each sentence, we can effectively model the rewards of sentences. Moreover, a novel attention mechanism is introduced to aggregate the scores of all sentences into a response-level score, which allows it to be trained using the Bradley-Terry model. On common benchmarks, our method outperforms the response-level reward model by 2.7% on RewardBench (for reward modeling evaluation) and surpasses all baselines on AlpacaEval (for alignment evaluation).
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_04793
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Sentence-level Reward Model can Generalize Better for Aligning LLM from Human Preference
Qiu, Wenjie
Li, Yi-Chen
Zhang, Xuqin
Zhang, Tianyi
Zhang, Yihang
Zhang, Zongzhang
Yu, Yang
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Learning reward models from human preference datasets and subsequently optimizing language models via reinforcement learning has emerged as a fundamental paradigm for aligning LLMs with human preferences. The performance of the reward model plays a crucial role in the effectiveness of alignment. Previous reward models operate at a coarse-grained level, requiring the generation of a complete response to obtain a reward value. The sparse reward may present challenges for downstream reinforcement learning. While recent efforts have attempted to learn token-level reward models, the lack of explicit semantic information makes it difficult to model the credit of every individual token. In this paper, we propose assigning scores to every sentence, introducing an intermediate-grained reward model. By segmenting the complete response into sentences and applying differential operations to reward output at the start and end positions of each sentence, we can effectively model the rewards of sentences. Moreover, a novel attention mechanism is introduced to aggregate the scores of all sentences into a response-level score, which allows it to be trained using the Bradley-Terry model. On common benchmarks, our method outperforms the response-level reward model by 2.7% on RewardBench (for reward modeling evaluation) and surpasses all baselines on AlpacaEval (for alignment evaluation).
title Sentence-level Reward Model can Generalize Better for Aligning LLM from Human Preference
topic Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.04793