In the era of Large Language Models (LLMs), alignment has emerged as a fundamental yet challenging problem in the pursuit of more reliable, controllable, and capable machine intelligence. The recent success of reasoning models and conversational AI systems has underscored the critical role of reinforcement learning (RL) in enhancing these systems, driving increased research interest at the intersection of RL and LLM alignment. This paper provides a comprehensive review of recent advances in LLM alignment through the lens of inverse reinforcement learning (IRL), emphasizing the distinctions between RL techniques employed in LLM alignment and those in conventional RL tasks. In particular, we highlight the necessity of constructing neural reward models from human data and discuss the formal and practical implications of this paradigm shift. We begin by introducing fundamental concepts in RL to provide a foundation for readers unfamiliar with the field. We then examine recent advances in this research agenda, discussing key challenges and opportunities in conducting IRL for LLM alignment. Beyond methodological considerations, we explore practical aspects, including datasets, benchmarks, evaluation metrics, infrastructure, and computationally efficient training and inference techniques. Finally, we draw insights from the literature on sparse-reward RL to identify open questions and potential research directions. By synthesizing findings from diverse studies, we aim to provide a structured and critical overview of the field, highlight unresolved challenges, and outline promising future directions for improving LLM alignment through RL and IRL techniques.
ETH AI Center（苏黎世联邦理工学院人工智能中心）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；TU Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）
Designing dialog tutors has been challenging as it involves modeling the diverse and complex pedagogical strategies employed by human tutors. Although there have been significant recent advances in neural conversational systems using large language models (LLMs) and growth in available dialog corpora, dialog tutoring has largely remained unaffected by these advances. In this paper, we rigorously analyze various generative language models on two dialog tutoring datasets for language learning using automatic and human evaluations to understand the new opportunities brought by these advances as w…
When Large Language Models Meet Law: Dual-Lens Taxonomy, Technical Advances, and Ethical Governance
School of Law, China University of Political Science and Law（中国政法大学法学院）；Zhejiang University of Finance and Economics Dongfang College（浙江财经大学东洋学院）；School of Information Management for Law, China University of Political Science and Law（中国政法大学信息管理法学院）；Department of Artificial Intelligence, Chung-Ang University（成均馆大学人工智能系）；Department of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学数据科学与人工智能系）
A Survey of Optimization Modeling Meets LLMs: Progress and Future Directions
The State Key Laboratory of Blockchain and Data Security, Zhejiang University（区块链与数据安全国家重点实验室，浙江大学）；Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab（华为诺亚方舟实验室）；School of Business, Singapore University of Social Sciences（新加坡国立大学商学院）；Hangzhou High-Tech Zone (Binjiang) Institute of Blockchain and Data Security（杭州高新技术区（滨江）区块链与数据安全研究院）
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）
Deep learning has recently become very popular on account of its incredible success in many complex data-driven applications, such as image classification and speech recognition. The database community has worked on data-driven applications for many years, and therefore should be playing a lead role in supporting this new wave. However, databases and deep learning are different in terms of both techniques and applications. In this paper, we discuss research problems at the intersection of the two fields. In particular, we discuss possible improvements for deep learning systems from a database …
When Federated Learning Meets Quantum Computing: Survey and Research Opportunities
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, BITS Pilani Dubai Campus（计算机科学与工程系，比斯帕尼迪拜校区）；Department of Computer Science, Missouri University of Science and Technology（计算机科学系，密苏里科技大学）
Causal inference has numerous real-world applications in many domains, such as health care, marketing, political science, and online advertising. Treatment effect estimation, a fundamental problem in causal inference, has been extensively studied in statistics for decades. However, traditional treatment effect estimation methods may not well handle large-scale and high-dimensional heterogeneous data. In recent years, an emerging research direction has attracted increasing attention in the broad artificial intelligence field, which combines the advantages of traditional treatment effect estimat…
Recent advances in Internet of Things (IoT) technologies and the reduction in the cost of sensors have encouraged the development of smart environments, such as smart homes. Smart homes can offer home assistance services to improve the quality of life, autonomy and health of their residents, especially for the elderly and dependent. To provide such services, a smart home must be able to understand the daily activities of its residents. Techniques for recognizing human activity in smart homes are advancing daily. But new challenges are emerging every day. In this paper, we present recent algori…
This paper reviews recent advances in the field of optimization under uncertainty via a modern data lens, highlights key research challenges and promise of data-driven optimization that organically integrates machine learning and mathematical programming for decision-making under uncertainty, and identifies potential research opportunities. A brief review of classical mathematical programming techniques for hedging against uncertainty is first presented, along with their wide spectrum of applications in Process Systems Engineering. A comprehensive review and classification of the relevant publ…
University of Illinois at Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）；Lehigh University（理海大学）
With recent advances in data collection from multiple sources, multi-view data has received significant attention. In multi-view data, each view represents a different perspective of data. Since label information is often expensive to acquire, multi-view clustering has gained growing interest, which aims to obtain better clustering solution by exploiting complementary and consistent information across all views rather than only using an individual view. Due to inevitable sensor failures, data in each view may contain error. Error often exhibits as noise or feature-specific corruptions or outli…
This paper provides an overview of how recent advances in machine learning and the availability of data from earth observing satellites can dramatically improve our ability to automatically map croplands over long period and over large regions. It discusses three applications in the domain of crop monitoring where ML approaches are beginning to show great promise. For each application, it highlights machine learning challenges, proposed approaches, and recent results. The paper concludes with discussion of major challenges that need to be addressed before ML approaches will reach their full po…
