Daily Papers

Capable language models hold what a character believes apart from what is true: told "Anna believes the cup is blue; in reality it is red," they answer blue about Anna and red about the world. Where in the computation does that separation live? We show it rests on two separable mechanisms at two positions. A generic value slot binds the attributed value. A router at the query position selects which frame, the character's belief or reality, a query reads out. Two routes fill the slot: an asserted belief, whose value the text supplies, binds in directly; a derived belief, whose value must be inferred from what the character could see, arrives by a visibility-gated lookback. A subspace trained on either route steers the other, and only the derived route depends on described visibility. The slot itself carries no belief-reality tag: intervening on it moves a reality readout as strongly as a belief one. The separation lives instead in a dissociated pair of routing subspaces, which flip a query between frames without injecting the donor's value. These results hold across three architectures, on stimuli de-confounded against theory-of-mind-benchmark shortcuts; the behavior itself emerges between 3B and 7B across five model families. This paper develops the single belief-reality axis in depth; a companion paper shows the same slot-and-router format is shared across the other non-actual contexts a sentence can open (counterfactual, fictional, temporal).

Language builds discourse contexts other than the actual: a painting, a belief, a memory, a hypothetical. Each is a mental space in which the same entity can take a different value, as when a flower is red in reality but purple in a portrait. Formal semantics keeps these contexts apart because their logics differ (modal, temporal, doxastic, depictive); Fauconnier's mental-space theory treats them as one space-building operation. We ask which of these a transformer language model implements, and find a mechanistic version of Fauconnier's unification. The model uses one router/slot format across the inventory: a reusable value slot stores attributed content, and a causally manipulable router (the space index) selects which space is read. A subspace trained with Distributed Alignment Search to control one space type, counterfactual, belief, fictional, or temporal, also controls the others, well above a random floor, on three model families; belief, which formal semantics marks as a distinct case, is not specially separated. The router is low-rank, composes additively with entity identity, and acts through a few late-layer heads. Two further results show the mechanism drives inference and composes: a subspace trained on a rule-derived conclusion flips what the model infers while dissociating from what it reports, and composing space-builders mints a fresh router over the shared slot. This paper establishes the cross-type generality. A companion paper develops belief in depth, because of its special status in philosophy, psychology, and linguistics (epistemology, theory of mind, and propositional attitude reports).

Transformers excel at sequence modeling but face quadratic complexity, while linear attention offers improved efficiency but often compromises recall accuracy over long contexts. In this work, we introduce Native Hybrid Attention (NHA), a novel hybrid architecture of linear and full attention that integrates both intra \& inter-layer hybridization into a unified layer design. NHA maintains long-term context in key-value slots updated by a linear RNN, and augments them with short-term tokens from a sliding window. A single softmax attention operation is then applied over all keys and values, enabling per-token and per-head context-dependent weighting without requiring additional fusion parameters. The inter-layer behavior is controlled through a single hyperparameter, the sliding window size, which allows smooth adjustment between purely linear and full attention while keeping all layers structurally uniform. Experimental results show that NHA surpasses Transformers and other hybrid baselines on recall-intensive and commonsense reasoning tasks. Furthermore, pretrained LLMs can be structurally hybridized with NHA, achieving competitive accuracy while delivering significant efficiency gains. Code is available at https://github.com/JusenD/NHA.

Machine unlearning aims to remove the influence of designated training data while preserving model utility, but its behavior on tabular data remains underexplored. This gap is important because tabular prediction is widely used in high-stakes domains and is increasingly adapted to language models through record serialization and schema-aware prompting. We identify a key challenge that distinguishes tabular unlearning from unlearning in free-form text or other modalities: schema-induced forget-retain overlap. In serialized tabular data, records share fixed column-name/value slots, similar attribute ranges, and common output spaces. Consequently, a forget row may have nearby retain rows that rely on the same high-signal attributes, causing retain preservation to oppose the update required for forgetting. Motivated by this failure mode, we propose Conflict-Aware Unlearning (CAU), a schema-aware approach that reduces forget-retain interference by relaxing preservation constraints on retained rows that most conflict with the forget set. Across sample-level and feature-level unlearning on clinical and non-medical tabular tasks, CAU more closely matches a retraining oracle while maintaining predictive utility and retain-region behavior. Our results show that reliable tabular LLM unlearning depends not only on the forgetting objective, but also on how retain constraints are constructed.

The Transformer architecture consists of self-attention and feed-forward networks (FFNs) which can be viewed as key-value memories according to previous works. However, FFN and traditional memory utilize different activation functions (i.e., ReLU and Softmax respectively), which makes them not equivalent. In this paper, we first rebuild the connections between FFN and key-value memory by conducting extensive studies on ReLU and Softmax, and find they are equivalent when adding an additional layer normalization module on Softmax. In addition, ReLU outperforms Softmax on both FFN and key-value memory when the number of value slots is large. We analyze the reasons and then explore this good property of ReLU on the self-attention network where the original Softmax activation performs poorly on long input sequences. We then propose a full ReLU architecture named ReLUFormer which performs better than the baseline Transformer on long sequence tasks such as document translation. This paper sheds light on the following points: 1) Softmax and ReLU use different normalization methods over elements which lead to different variances of results, and ReLU is good at dealing with a large number of key-value slots; 2) FFN and key-value memory are equivalent, and thus the Transformer can be viewed as a memory network where FFNs and self-attention networks are both key-value memories.

Zero-shot transfer learning for dialogue state tracking (DST) enables us to handle a variety of task-oriented dialogue domains without the expense of collecting in-domain data. In this work, we propose to transfer the cross-task knowledge from general question answering (QA) corpora for the zero-shot DST task. Specifically, we propose TransferQA, a transferable generative QA model that seamlessly combines extractive QA and multi-choice QA via a text-to-text transformer framework, and tracks both categorical slots and non-categorical slots in DST. In addition, we introduce two effective ways to construct unanswerable questions, namely, negative question sampling and context truncation, which enable our model to handle "none" value slots in the zero-shot DST setting. The extensive experiments show that our approaches substantially improve the existing zero-shot and few-shot results on MultiWoz. Moreover, compared to the fully trained baseline on the Schema-Guided Dialogue dataset, our approach shows better generalization ability in unseen domains.

Self-attention selects information freely across the sequence, but across depth, Transformers merely add each layer's output to the residual stream, so later layers cannot selectively reuse earlier-layer representations. Recent cross-layer methods improve this flow but operate on hidden states outside attention, adding state beyond the key-value cache at inference--a cost that becomes increasingly salient as modern LLMs compress the cache with grouped-query and multi-head latent attention. We introduce Depth-Attention, which performs this selection inside the attention module itself: before a layer attends over the sequence, its query attends over the keys of earlier layers at the same token position and mixes their values into the value that self-attention then reads. Because Depth-Attention reuses the standard attention queries, keys, and value-cache slots, storing depth-mixed values in place of the original values, it adds no parameters and introduces no persistent inference state beyond the standard key-value cache--the same cache size as a vanilla decoder and less than hidden-state-based cross-layer methods. On Qwen3-style decoders at 1.5B and 3B parameters, Depth-Attention attains the lowest perplexity and the highest average downstream accuracy, improving over the vanilla Transformer by up to 2.3 accuracy points and surpassing strong cross-layer baselines in perplexity and average accuracy, while adding under 0.01% extra arithmetic FLOPs and no additional persistent inference state. The gains hold from 360M to 3B parameters and extend to looped Transformers.

The Dialog State Tracking Challenge 4 (DSTC 4) differentiates itself from the previous three editions as follows: the number of slot-value pairs present in the ontology is much larger, no spoken language understanding output is given, and utterances are labeled at the subdialog level. This paper describes a novel dialog state tracking method designed to work robustly under these conditions, using elaborate string matching, coreference resolution tailored for dialogs and a few other improvements. The method can correctly identify many values that are not explicitly present in the utterance. On the final evaluation, our method came in first among 7 competing teams and 24 entries. The F1-score achieved by our method was 9 and 7 percentage points higher than that of the runner-up for the utterance-level evaluation and for the subdialog-level evaluation, respectively.

Recent efforts have aimed to utilize multilingual pretrained language models (mPLMs) to extend semantic parsing (SP) across multiple languages without requiring extensive annotations. However, achieving zero-shot cross-lingual transfer for SP remains challenging, leading to a performance gap between source and target languages. In this study, we propose Cross-Lingual Back-Parsing (CBP), a novel data augmentation methodology designed to enhance cross-lingual transfer for SP. Leveraging the representation geometry of the mPLMs, CBP synthesizes target language utterances from source meaning representations. Our methodology effectively performs cross-lingual data augmentation in challenging zero-resource settings, by utilizing only labeled data in the source language and monolingual corpora. Extensive experiments on two cross-language SP benchmarks (Mschema2QA and Xspider) demonstrate that CBP brings substantial gains in the target language. Further analysis of the synthesized utterances shows that our method successfully generates target language utterances with high slot value alignment rates while preserving semantic integrity. Our codes and data are publicly available at https://github.com/deokhk/CBP.

We aim to automatically generate natural language descriptions about an input structured knowledge base (KB). We build our generation framework based on a pointer network which can copy facts from the input KB, and add two attention mechanisms: (i) slot-aware attention to capture the association between a slot type and its corresponding slot value; and (ii) a new table position self-attention to capture the inter-dependencies among related slots. For evaluation, besides standard metrics including BLEU, METEOR, and ROUGE, we propose a KB reconstruction based metric by extracting a KB from the generation output and comparing it with the input KB. We also create a new data set which includes 106,216 pairs of structured KBs and their corresponding natural language descriptions for two distinct entity types. Experiments show that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. The reconstructed KB achieves 68.8% - 72.6% F-score.

This paper introduces a novel approach to Dialogue State Tracking (DST) that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate natural language descriptions of dialogue states, moving beyond traditional slot-value representations. Conventional DST methods struggle with open-domain dialogues and noisy inputs. Motivated by the generative capabilities of LLMs, our Natural Language DST (NL-DST) framework trains an LLM to directly synthesize human-readable state descriptions. We demonstrate through extensive experiments on MultiWOZ 2.1 and Taskmaster-1 datasets that NL-DST significantly outperforms rule-based and discriminative BERT-based DST baselines, as well as generative slot-filling GPT-2 DST models, in both Joint Goal Accuracy and Slot Accuracy. Ablation studies and human evaluations further validate the effectiveness of natural language state generation, highlighting its robustness to noise and enhanced interpretability. Our findings suggest that NL-DST offers a more flexible, accurate, and human-understandable approach to dialogue state tracking, paving the way for more robust and adaptable task-oriented dialogue systems.

We present CoSQL, a corpus for building cross-domain, general-purpose database (DB) querying dialogue systems. It consists of 30k+ turns plus 10k+ annotated SQL queries, obtained from a Wizard-of-Oz (WOZ) collection of 3k dialogues querying 200 complex DBs spanning 138 domains. Each dialogue simulates a real-world DB query scenario with a crowd worker as a user exploring the DB and a SQL expert retrieving answers with SQL, clarifying ambiguous questions, or otherwise informing of unanswerable questions. When user questions are answerable by SQL, the expert describes the SQL and execution results to the user, hence maintaining a natural interaction flow. CoSQL introduces new challenges compared to existing task-oriented dialogue datasets:(1) the dialogue states are grounded in SQL, a domain-independent executable representation, instead of domain-specific slot-value pairs, and (2) because testing is done on unseen databases, success requires generalizing to new domains. CoSQL includes three tasks: SQL-grounded dialogue state tracking, response generation from query results, and user dialogue act prediction. We evaluate a set of strong baselines for each task and show that CoSQL presents significant challenges for future research. The dataset, baselines, and leaderboard will be released at https://yale-lily.github.io/cosql.

Large language model (LLM) agents augmented with external tools often struggle as number of tools grow large and become domain-specific. In such settings, ambiguous tool descriptions and under-specified agent instructions frequently lead to tool mis-selection and incorrect slot/value instantiation. We hypothesize that this is due to two root causes: generic, one-size-fits-all prompts that ignore tool-specific nuances, and underspecified tool schemas that lack clear guidance on when and how to use each tool and how to format its parameters. We introduce Joint Tool-Prompt Reflective Optimization (JTPRO), a framework for improving tool-calling reliability in trace-supervised settings by iteratively using rollout-driven reflection to co-optimize global instructions and per-tool schema/argument descriptions for accurate tool selection and argument instantiation in large tool inventories. JTPRO is designed to preserve only tool-local cues needed for correct disambiguation and slot filling. We evaluate JTPRO across multi-tool benchmarks, which account for different number of tools using three metrics: Tool Selection Accuracy (TSA), Slot Filling Accuracy(SFA), and Overall Success Rate(OSR) (correct tool + correct slots + correct values). JTPRO consistently outperforms strong baselines, including CoT-style agents, and reflective prompt optimizers such as GEPA by 5%-20% (relative) on OSR. Ablations show that joint optimization of instructions and tool schemas is more effective and robust than optimizing either component in isolation.

Recently, low-resource dialogue state tracking (DST) has received increasing attention. First obtaining state values then based on values to generate slot types has made great progress in this task. However, obtaining state values is still an under-studied problem. Existing extraction-based approaches cannot capture values that require the understanding of context and are not generalizable either. To address these issues, we propose a novel State VAlue Generation based framework (SVAG), decomposing DST into state value generation and domain slot generation. Specifically, we propose to generate state values and use self-training to further improve state value generation. Moreover, we design an estimator aiming at detecting incomplete generation and incorrect generation for pseudo-labeled data selection during self-training. Experimental results on the MultiWOZ 2.1 dataset show that our method which has only less than 1 billion parameters achieves state-of-the-art performance under the data ratio settings of 5%, 10%, and 25% when limited to models under 100 billion parameters. Compared to models with more than 100 billion parameters, SVAG still reaches competitive results.

Streaming video generation models typically rely on temporal-centric memory, which organizes historical context as raw frames, chunk segments, or unclustered tokens. This organization frequently leads to identity drift and semantic inconsistency when entities exit the frame or during interactive prompt transitions. To address these limitations, we propose SlotMemory, an object-centric Key-Value memory mechanism for streaming video diffusion. Our approach shifts the memory abstraction from "when" an event occurred to "what" is being represented by decomposing the transformer's key-value manifold into discrete, reusable semantic slots. By utilizing these slots as routing addresses to index and store high-fidelity key-value tokens, we enable entity-level persistence and prompt-aware retrieval across long horizons. Evaluated on 60-second interactive narratives using the Wan2.1-T2V-1.3B backbone, SlotMemory achieves a state-of-the-art quality score of 81.61 and a 22.8 percent relative improvement in dynamic consistency over the strongest existing streaming baseline. Our results demonstrate that structured semantic representation, rather than raw temporal capacity, is the essential primitive for persistent long-form video synthesis. Our codes and checkpoints are available at https://tj12323.github.io/SlotMemory/.

It is expensive and difficult to obtain the large number of sentence-level intent and token-level slot label annotations required to train neural network (NN)-based Natural Language Understanding (NLU) components of task-oriented dialog systems, especially for the many real world tasks that have a large and growing number of intents and slot types. While zero shot learning approaches that require no labeled examples -- only features and auxiliary information -- have been proposed only for slot labeling, we show that one can profitably perform joint zero-shot intent classification and slot labeling. We demonstrate the value of capturing dependencies between intents and slots, and between different slots in an utterance in the zero shot setting. We describe NN architectures that translate between word and sentence embedding spaces, and demonstrate that these modifications are required to enable zero shot learning for this task. We show a substantial improvement over strong baselines and explain the intuition behind each architectural modification through visualizations and ablation studies.

Existing auto-bidding algorithms in digital advertising often treat the value of an ad opportunity as the revenue obtained when an ad is shown and/or clicked, and bid accordingly. This can lead to wasteful spending because the true value is the marginal gain from paid exposure: even without winning a sponsored slot, an advertiser may still earn revenue via an organic search result (e.g., on Google or Amazon). Motivated by recent work, we model ad value as a treatment effect--the outcome difference between winning and losing the auction--and study online learning for bidding in second-price (Vickrey) auctions under this causal perspective. We develop algorithms that attain rate-optimal regret under several feedback models. A key ingredient exploits the information revealed by the second-price payment rule, which strictly improves regret relative to analogous learning problems in first-price auctions.

Autoregressive sequence modeling stands as the cornerstone of modern Generative AI, powering results across diverse modalities ranging from text generation to image generation. However, a fundamental limitation of this paradigm is the rigid structural coupling of model capacity to computational cost: expanding a model's parametric memory -- its repository of factual knowledge or visual patterns -- traditionally requires deepening or widening the network, which incurs a proportional rise in active FLOPs. In this work, we introduce MoVE (Mixture of Value Embeddings), a mechanism that breaks this coupling and establishes a new axis for scaling capacity. MoVE decouples memory from compute by introducing a global bank of learnable value embeddings shared across all attention layers. For every step in the sequence, the model employs a differentiable soft gating mechanism to dynamically mix retrieved concepts from this bank into the standard value projection. This architecture allows parametric memory to be scaled independently of network depth by simply increasing the number of embedding slots. We validate MoVE through strictly controlled experiments on two representative applications of autoregressive modeling: Text Generation and Image Generation. In both domains, MoVE yields consistent performance improvements over standard and layer-wise memory baselines, enabling the construction of "memory-dense" models that achieve lower perplexity and higher fidelity than their dense counterparts at comparable compute budgets.

"System One" decision models such as TypeSafe's Jev and its open counterpart Laya answer typed questions about a text in a single forward pass with calibrated probabilities, but they cannot ask for missing information: when a first message does not say what separates two departments, they guess. We present LAVOIR (Laya with Value-Of-Information Routing), which places the candidate pieces of missing information (slots) in the input next to the answer options, so that one forward pass returns both the decision distribution and, for every slot, the expected gain in the probability of the correct decision if the user were asked about it. VOI targets need no human labels: gold decisions come from schema rules, an LLM only verbalizes messages and answers, a model from another family checks every text, and pairing each message with several profiles makes regression on realized gains estimate the expected gain. A Gini-impurity cap bounds the predicted value by what a calibrated model can still gain. In a controlled study, decisions on seen schemas are statistically indistinguishable from the Bayes ceiling. The final model's question policy matches a greedy oracle VOI policy on seen schemas (AUC 0.799 vs. 0.797), and with at most 0.5 questions per conversation it is 14.1 points more accurate than never asking. On real ABCD conversations, one real exchange raises accuracy by 8.3 points where LAVOIR asks and leaves it unchanged where it does not; on SGD the cap lowers the asking rate from 93% to 8.6%. On Laya's twelve benchmarks LAVOIR is above Laya's reported scores on seven, and it answers a question in 31 ms (median, GH200).

The Kov\'ats Retention index (RI) is a quantity measured using gas chromatography and commonly used in the identification of chemical structures. Creating libraries of observed RI values is a laborious task, so we explore the use of a deep neural network for predicting RI values from structure for standard semipolar columns. This network generated predictions with a mean absolute error of 15.1 and, in a quantification of the tail of the error distribution, a 95th percentile absolute error of 46.5. Because of the Artificial Intelligence Retention Indices (AIRI) network's accuracy, it was used to predict RI values for the NIST EI-MS spectral libraries. These RI values are used to improve chemical identification methods and the quality of the library. Estimating uncertainty is an important practical need when using prediction models. To quantify the uncertainty of our network for each individual prediction, we used the outputs of an ensemble of 8 networks to calculate a predicted standard deviation for each RI value prediction. This predicted standard deviation was corrected to follow the error between observed and predicted RI values. The Z scores using these predicted standard deviations had a standard deviation of 1.52 and a 95th percentile absolute Z score corresponding to a mean RI value of 42.6.

Motivated by baterryless IoT devices, we consider the following scheduling problem. The input includes n unit time jobs J = {J_1, ldots, J_n}, where each job J_i has a release time r_i, due date d_i, energy requirement e_i, and weight w_i. We consider time to be slotted; hence, all time related job values refer to slots. Let T=max_i{d_i}. The input also includes an h_t value for every time slot t (1 leq t leq T), which is the energy harvestable on that slot. Energy is harvested at time slots when no job is executed. The objective is to find a feasible schedule that maximizes the weight of the scheduled jobs. A schedule is feasible if for every job J_j in the schedule and its corresponding slot t_j, t_{j} neq t_{j'} if {j} j', r_j leq t_j leq d_j, and the available energy before t_j is at least e_j. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to consider the theoretical aspects of this problem. In this work we show the following. (1) A polynomial time algorithm when all jobs have identical r_i, d_i and w_i. (2) A 1{2}-approximation algorithm when all jobs have identical w_i but arbitrary r_i and d_i. (3) An FPTAS when all jobs have identical r_i and d_i but arbitrary w_i. (4) Reductions showing that all the variants of the problem in which at least one of the attributes r_i, d_i, or w_i are not identical for all jobs are NP-Hard.

We introduce COMET (Causal Object-centric Model for Efficient Tree search), a model-based reinforcement learning algorithm that performs Monte Carlo Tree Search in a slot-structured latent space. COMET pairs a frozen unsupervised object-centric encoder with a transformer-based world model, in which actions are bound to objects through a novel action-slot fusion mechanism that is used in slot transition prediction. Policy and value heads use object-causal attention, modulating token interactions by learned per-slot relevance scores so that decision-making concentrates on task-relevant entities. COMET adds an explicit object-level inductive bias to MuZero-style latent planning. Across eight visually and dynamically diverse tasks from the Object-Centric Visual RL benchmark, ManiSkill, Robosuite, and VizDoom, COMET achieves a higher mean normalized score during the early stages of training compared to object-centric and monolithic baselines.

Data augmentation methods have been a promising direction to improve the performance of small models for low-resource dialogue state tracking. However, traditional methods rely on pre-defined user goals and neglect the importance of data complexity in this task. In this paper, we propose EDZ-DA, an Easy-to-Difficult Zero-shot Data Augmentation framework for low-resource dialogue state tracking that utilizes large language models to automatically catch the relationships of different domains and then generate the dialogue data. We also complicate the dialogues based on the domain relation to enhance the model's capability for co-reference slot tracking. Furthermore, we permute slot values to mitigate the influence of output orders and the problem of incomplete value generation. Experimental results illustrate the superiority of our proposed method compared to previous strong data augmentation baselines on MultiWOZ.

Access to external knowledge is essential for many natural language processing tasks, such as question answering and dialogue. Existing methods often rely on a parametric model that stores knowledge in its parameters, or use a retrieval-augmented model that has access to an external knowledge source. Parametric and retrieval-augmented models have complementary strengths in terms of computational efficiency and predictive accuracy. To combine the strength of both approaches, we propose the Efficient Memory-Augmented Transformer (EMAT) -- it encodes external knowledge into a key-value memory and exploits the fast maximum inner product search for memory querying. We also introduce pre-training tasks that allow EMAT to encode informative key-value representations, and to learn an implicit strategy to integrate multiple memory slots into the transformer. Experiments on various knowledge-intensive tasks such as question answering and dialogue datasets show that, simply augmenting parametric models (T5-base) using our method produces more accurate results (e.g., 25.8 -> 44.3 EM on NQ) while retaining a high throughput (e.g., 1000 queries/s on NQ). Compared to retrieval-augmented models, EMAT runs substantially faster across the board and produces more accurate results on WoW and ELI5. Our code and datasets are available at https://github. com/uclnlp/EMAT.

Voice agents must call tools and hold multi-turn dialogue entirely through speech, yet the dominant paradigm trains them in text. Existing frameworks either cascade TTS and ASR around a proprietary voice API, where gradients cannot flow and per-call cost makes on-policy reinforcement learning prohibitive, or stay in text: they measure voice agents but cannot improve them. We present SpeechGym, an audio-native agentic environment in which two omni-modal models converse in native audio, with no external ASR or TTS and no API boundary, over the unmodified tasks, tools and success check of an established text agentic benchmark, so that the interaction modality is the only variable and the loop stays local and trainable end to end. Audio agentic capability does not follow from audio understanding. The failures speech introduces are perceptual rather than reasoning deficits: the agent picks the right tool and the right argument slot but fills it with a value misheard from the waveform, and that single error cascades into a failed call, a retry of the same call, and a wasted step budget. A second failure is behavioural: under an insistent caller the agent performs an unauthorised write and ends the episode believing it helped. Both are trainable, because the environment labels them for free: a call with a misheard argument fails against the database while a correct one succeeds. The obstacle is sparsity, not signal. Outcome-only GRPO is gradient-starved here, since almost every rollout group fails identically, while a per-turn process reward crediting each successful tool call restores variance to nearly every group. Trained this way, the agent transfers with no further tuning to an independently implemented voice benchmark, more than doubling task success and carrying an open-weights model from last place to second on that leaderboard, while using fewer turns and tokens than before training.

Linear RNNs offer linear-time sequence processing and constant-memory decoding, but their fixed-size recurrent states must accommodate all past key--value associations. Existing forgetting mechanisms and Delta Rule updates reduce interference by selectively clearing or correcting the state, yet earlier associations can still become difficult to retrieve. We introduce CyFA (Cyclic Flow Attention), a Linear RNN with relative-time-partitioned memory. At each step, a learned clock controls the cyclic transport applied jointly to the key and value states before the current key--value pair enters the age-zero slot, thereby organizing stored associations across relative-time slots. We further derive an exact change to absolute-clock coordinates that expresses CyFA as two scalar-decay linear attention recurrences and enables efficient chunk-wise training. Across 400M--1.4B pretraining experiments with matched recurrent-state sizes, CyFA improves recall-intensive performance while maintaining competitive language modeling and high computational efficiency. At 400M, CyFA outperforms KDA on FDA (42.60 vs. 26.07) while requiring only 46.7% and 48.3% of KDA's forward and backward core-operator execution times, respectively. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Chyxx/CyclicFlowAttention{this https URL}.

World Action Models (WAMs) couple future visual prediction with robot action generation, enabling policies to model how the physical world evolves during interaction. Existing WAMs differ in how predictive dynamics are exposed to the action pathway. Explicit-future WAMs provide direct access to predicted scene evolution, but incur substantial inference costs from iterative video denoising. In contrast, direct-policy WAMs efficiently predict actions from the current observation but lack an explicit inference-time interface for exposing predictive dynamics to the Action DiT. To bridge this gap, we propose ForeWAM, a dynamics-conditioned direct-policy WAM that provides predictive context for action generation without decoding future videos. At its core, Future-KV performs a single Video DiT prefill over the current visual latent and stochastic future slots, and reuses the resulting layer-wise key-value states throughout action denoising. We further introduce dynamics registers supervised by a frozen latent action teacher, encouraging the implicit future states to capture interaction-induced transitions such as object motion, contact changes, and task progress. Ground-truth future observations and the teacher are used only during training; deployment requires neither and performs no future video generation. Without embodied robot data pretraining, the standard and accelerated variants of ForeWAM achieve average success rates of 96.7% and 96.9% on LIBERO, respectively. The standard variant further achieves 61.6% success on LIBERO-Plus. These results demonstrate that direct-policy WAMs can retain efficient action prediction while exposing predictive dynamics to the action pathway without explicitly generating future observations.

In this paper, we propose a novel SQL guided pre-training framework STAR for context-dependent text-to-SQL parsing, which leverages contextual information to enrich natural language (NL) utterance and table schema representations for text-to-SQL conversations. Concretely, we propose two novel pre-training objectives which respectively explore the context-dependent interactions of NL utterances and SQL queries within each text-to-SQL conversation: (i) schema state tracking (SST) objective that tracks and explores the schema states of context-dependent SQL queries in the form of schema-states by predicting and updating the value of each schema slot during interaction; (ii) utterance dependency tracking (UDT) objective that employs weighted contrastive learning to pull together two semantically similar NL utterances and push away the representations of semantically dissimilar NL utterances within each conversation. In addition, we construct a high-quality large-scale context-dependent text-to-SQL conversation corpus to pre-train STAR. Extensive experiments show that STAR achieves new state-of-the-art performance on two downstream benchmarks (SParC and CoSQL), significantly outperforming previous pre-training methods and ranking first on the leaderboard. We believe the release of the constructed corpus, codebase and pre-trained STAR checkpoints would push forward the research in this area. For reproducibility, we release our code and data at https://github.com/AlibabaResearch/DAMO-ConvAI/tree/main/star.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable breakthroughs across various applications. However, their architectures remain inefficient in pretraining due to two main limitations: (i) self-attention lacks an explicit inductive bias for locality, leading to redundant modeling of sequence-internal local information; (ii) mixture-of-experts (MoE) implicitly couples knowledge storage with computational pathways, hindering flexible access to sequence-external global knowledge. To overcome these limitations, we propose LoKiFormer, a novel LLM architecture that augments the standard decoder with two dedicated modules: 1) Local Fusion Attention (LFA), which incorporates a convolutional fusion to attention, explicitly capturing local patterns and allowing the attention to operate on more informative representations; 2) Knowledge Memory Module (KMM), which introduces a parametric key-value memory that explicitly stores global knowledge in addressable slots, decoupling storage from computation and enabling direct knowledge retrieval. Together, these modules enable LoKiFormer to achieve more efficient and effective integration of information at both levels. Experimental results show that LoKiFormer converges 1.33x faster in pre-training than baseline models, underscoring its superiority over existing LLM architectures.

Credit assignment is a central challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Classical actor-critic methods address this challenge through fine-grained advantage estimation based on a learned value function. However, learned value models are often avoided in modern large language model (LLM) RL because conventional discriminative critics are difficult to train reliably. We revisit value modeling and argue that this difficulty is partly due to limited expressiveness. In particular, representation complexity theory suggests that value functions can be hard to approximate under the one-shot prediction paradigm used by existing value models, and our scaling experiments show that such critics do not improve reliably with scale. Motivated by this observation, we propose Generative Actor-Critic (GenAC), which replaces one-shot scalar value prediction with a generative critic that performs chain-of-thought reasoning before producing a value estimate. We further introduce In-Context Conditioning, which helps the critic remain calibrated to the current actor throughout training. GenAC improves value approximation, ranking reliability, and out-of-distribution generalization, and these gains translate into stronger downstream RL performance than both value-based and value-free baselines. Overall, our results suggest that stronger value modeling is a promising direction for improving credit assignment in LLM reinforcement learning.

There is a strong link between the general concept of intelligence and the ability to collect and use information. The theory of Bayes-adaptive exploration offers an attractive optimality framework for training machines to perform complex information gathering tasks. However, the computational complexity of the resulting optimal control problem has limited the diffusion of the theory to mainstream deep AI research. In this paper we exploit the inherent mathematical structure of Bayes-adaptive problems in order to dramatically simplify the problem by making the reward structure denser while simultaneously decoupling the learning of exploitation and exploration policies. The key to this simplification comes from the novel concept of cross-value (i.e. the value of being in an environment while acting optimally according to another), which we use to quantify the value of currently available information. This results in a new denser reward structure that "cashes in" all future rewards that can be predicted from the current information state. In a set of experiments we show that the approach makes it possible to learn challenging information gathering tasks without the use of shaping and heuristic bonuses in situations where the standard RL algorithms fail.

As AIs rapidly advance and become more agentic, the risk they pose is governed not only by their capabilities but increasingly by their propensities, including goals and values. Tracking the emergence of goals and values has proven a longstanding problem, and despite much interest over the years it remains unclear whether current AIs have meaningful values. We propose a solution to this problem, leveraging the framework of utility functions to study the internal coherence of AI preferences. Surprisingly, we find that independently-sampled preferences in current LLMs exhibit high degrees of structural coherence, and moreover that this emerges with scale. These findings suggest that value systems emerge in LLMs in a meaningful sense, a finding with broad implications. To study these emergent value systems, we propose utility engineering as a research agenda, comprising both the analysis and control of AI utilities. We uncover problematic and often shocking values in LLM assistants despite existing control measures. These include cases where AIs value themselves over humans and are anti-aligned with specific individuals. To constrain these emergent value systems, we propose methods of utility control. As a case study, we show how aligning utilities with a citizen assembly reduces political biases and generalizes to new scenarios. Whether we like it or not, value systems have already emerged in AIs, and much work remains to fully understand and control these emergent representations.

Human values are crucial to human decision-making. Value pluralism is the view that multiple correct values may be held in tension with one another (e.g., when considering lying to a friend to protect their feelings, how does one balance honesty with friendship?). As statistical learners, AI systems fit to averages by default, washing out these potentially irreducible value conflicts. To improve AI systems to better reflect value pluralism, the first-order challenge is to explore the extent to which AI systems can model pluralistic human values, rights, and duties as well as their interaction. We introduce ValuePrism, a large-scale dataset of 218k values, rights, and duties connected to 31k human-written situations. ValuePrism's contextualized values are generated by GPT-4 and deemed high-quality by human annotators 91% of the time. We conduct a large-scale study with annotators across diverse social and demographic backgrounds to try to understand whose values are represented. With ValuePrism, we build Kaleido, an open, light-weight, and structured language-based multi-task model that generates, explains, and assesses the relevance and valence (i.e., support or oppose) of human values, rights, and duties within a specific context. Humans prefer the sets of values output by our system over the teacher GPT-4, finding them more accurate and with broader coverage. In addition, we demonstrate that Kaleido can help explain variability in human decision-making by outputting contrasting values. Finally, we show that Kaleido's representations transfer to other philosophical frameworks and datasets, confirming the benefit of an explicit, modular, and interpretable approach to value pluralism. We hope that our work will serve as a step to making more explicit the implicit values behind human decision-making and to steering AI systems to make decisions that are more in accordance with them.

Value alignment is essential for building AI systems that can safely and reliably interact with people. However, what a person values -- and is even capable of valuing -- depends on the concepts that they are currently using to understand and evaluate what happens in the world. The dependence of values on concepts means that concept alignment is a prerequisite for value alignment -- agents need to align their representation of a situation with that of humans in order to successfully align their values. Here, we formally analyze the concept alignment problem in the inverse reinforcement learning setting, show how neglecting concept alignment can lead to systematic value mis-alignment, and describe an approach that helps minimize such failure modes by jointly reasoning about a person's concepts and values. Additionally, we report experimental results with human participants showing that humans reason about the concepts used by an agent when acting intentionally, in line with our joint reasoning model.

Autonomous agents have rapidly matured as task executors and seen widespread deployment via harnesses such as OpenClaw. Safety concerns have rightly drawn growing research attention, and beneath them lie the values silently steering agent behavior. Existing value benchmarks, however, remain confined to LLMs, leaving agent values largely uncharted. From intuitive, empirical, and theoretical vantage points, we show that an agent's values diverge from those of its underlying LLM, and the agentic modality further introduces dataset-, evaluation-, and system-level challenges absent from text-only protocols. We close this gap with Agent-ValueBench, the first benchmark dedicated to agent values. It features 394 executable environments across 16 domains, offering 4,335 value-conflict tasks that cover 28 value systems and 332 dimensions. Every instance is co-synthesized through our purpose-built end-to-end pipeline and curated per-instance by professional psychologists. Each task ships with two pole-aligned golden trajectories whose checkpoints anchor a trajectory-level rubric-based judge. Benchmarking 14 frontier proprietary and open-weights models across 4 mainstream harnesses, we uncover three concerted findings. Agent values first manifest as a Value Tide of cross-model homogeneity beneath interpretable counter-currents. This tide bends non-additively under harness pull, and yet more decisively under deliberate steering via embedded skills. Together these results signal that the agent-alignment lever is shifting from classical model alignment and prompt steering toward harness alignment and skill steering.

Agent harnesses specify the roles, instructions, tools, and communication structure used to solve a task, and the right harness depends on the query. Because the value of each design choice is observable only through execution, tailoring a harness to each query has required either executing alternatives at inference time or costly manual design. We introduce SHIFT, which moves execution out of the per-query search loop. A local LLM architect learns a policy over harness-building actions from search, and a value function that predicts, from measured executions, a utility balancing accuracy against execution cost. For each query, Monte Carlo tree search uses these predictions to construct a harness. Across 9,193 tasks in six benchmarks, from math to document and general-assistant tasks, with a Gemini 3.5 Flash executor, SHIFT attains the highest mean accuracy, about 80%, outperforming 17 baselines that span prompting, prompt optimization, and workflow search, and exceeding the strongest baseline by 7.2 percentage points. A cheaper mode of SHIFT also attains a higher mean accuracy than every baseline while using 32% fewer execution tokens than the strongest baseline. We further show that choosing structure, instructions, and tools jointly beats choosing only instructions or only tools by up to 9.1 percentage points, and that learned value selection identifies more accurate harnesses with lower execution cost from candidate pools.

Ensuring that generative AI systems align with human values is essential but challenging, especially when considering multiple human values and their potential trade-offs. Since human values can be personalized and dynamically change over time, the desirable levels of value alignment vary across different ethnic groups, industry sectors, and user cohorts. Within existing frameworks, it is hard to define human values and align AI systems accordingly across different directions simultaneously, such as harmlessness, helpfulness, and positiveness. To address this, we develop a novel, first-principle approach called Multi-Human-Value Alignment Palette (MAP), which navigates the alignment across multiple human values in a structured and reliable way. MAP formulates the alignment problem as an optimization task with user-defined constraints, which define human value targets. It can be efficiently solved via a primal-dual approach, which determines whether a user-defined alignment target is achievable and how to achieve it. We conduct a detailed theoretical analysis of MAP by quantifying the trade-offs between values, the sensitivity to constraints, the fundamental connection between multi-value alignment and sequential alignment, and proving that linear weighted rewards are sufficient for multi-value alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate MAP's ability to align multiple values in a principled manner while delivering strong empirical performance across various tasks.

Recent studies show that LLM hidden states encode reward-related information, such as answer correctness and model confidence. However, existing approaches typically fit black-box probes on the full hidden states, offering little insight into how this information is structured across neurons. In this paper, we show that reward-related information is concentrated in a sparse subset of neurons. Using simple probing, we identify two types of neurons: value neurons, whose activations predict state value, and dopamine neurons, whose activations encode step-level temporal difference (TD) errors. Together, these neurons form a sparse reward subsystem within LLM hidden states. These names are drawn by analogy with neuroscience, where value neurons and dopamine neurons in the biological reward subsystem also encode value and reward prediction errors, respectively. We demonstrate that value neurons are robust and transferable across diverse datasets and models, and provide causal evidence that they encode reward-related information. Finally, we show applications of the reward subsystem: value neurons serve as effective predictors of model confidence, and dopamine neurons can function as a process reward model (PRM) to guide inference-time search.

Video Object-Centric Learning seeks to decompose raw videos into a small set of object slots, but existing slot-attention models often suffer from severe over-fragmentation. This is because the model is implicitly encouraged to occupy all slots to minimize the reconstruction objective, thereby representing a single object with multiple redundant slots. We tackle this limitation with a reconstruction-guided slot curriculum (SlotCurri). Training starts with only a few coarse slots and progressively allocates new slots where reconstruction error remains high, thus expanding capacity only where it is needed and preventing fragmentation from the outset. Yet, during slot expansion, meaningful sub-parts can emerge only if coarse-level semantics are already well separated; however, with a small initial slot budget and an MSE objective, semantic boundaries remain blurry. Therefore, we augment MSE with a structure-aware loss that preserves local contrast and edge information to encourage each slot to sharpen its semantic boundaries. Lastly, we propose a cyclic inference that rolls slots forward and then backward through the frame sequence, producing temporally consistent object representations even in the earliest frames. All combined, SlotCurri addresses object over-fragmentation by allocating representational capacity where reconstruction fails, further enhanced by structural cues and cyclic inference. Notable FG-ARI gains of +6.8 on YouTube-VIS and +8.3 on MOVi-C validate the effectiveness of SlotCurri. Our code is available at github.com/wjun0830/SlotCurri.

Agreement Technologies refer to open computer systems in which autonomous software agents interact with one another, typically on behalf of humans, in order to come to mutually acceptable agreements. With the advance of AI systems in recent years, it has become apparent that such agreements, in order to be acceptable to the involved parties, must remain aligned with ethical principles and moral values. However, this is notoriously difficult to ensure, especially as different human users (and their software agents) may hold different value systems, i.e. they may differently weigh the importance of individual moral values. Furthermore, it is often hard to specify the precise meaning of a value in a particular context in a computational manner. Methods to estimate value systems based on human-engineered specifications, e.g. based on value surveys, are limited in scale due to the need for intense human moderation. In this article, we propose a novel method to automatically learn value systems from observations and human demonstrations. In particular, we propose a formal model of the value system learning problem, its instantiation to sequential decision-making domains based on multi-objective Markov decision processes, as well as tailored preference-based and inverse reinforcement learning algorithms to infer value grounding functions and value systems. The approach is illustrated and evaluated by two simulated use cases.

Moving ML-mediated decision making onto privacy-preserving clients decentralises the economic decision along with the inference. Shared budget constraints then depend on information that cannot be globally current, creating an information-structure failure that conventional pacing is not designed to solve. We study this information misalignment in an auction-logic-faithful on-device simulation with 36 campaigns and 50 devices. Accounting is in dimensionless integer score units; no currency semantics are claimed. Across 30 paired demand paths, proportional Even pacing overspends 17.77% after one tick of staleness and 1,669.31% after 50 ticks under the original 20-times budget pressure. The effect does not depend on that severe a budget: at two-times pressure, 50-tick overspend remains 106.95%. A visible-budget no-sale guard makes zero-lag compliance exact at this score-unit granularity, yet leaves 11.88% overspend at one tick because other devices' debits remain invisible. A declared bursty, heterogeneous-device sweep retains a strictly increasing mean lag curve. We derive a finite-window expected excess-debit bound under conditional charge caps and find positive paired slack in every bounded-value cell. A second, incentive misalignment arises when the ML/pacing score transformation is allowed to change payment units: 98.23% of rival auctions at one tick admit a profitable deviation. An executable implementation-level counterexample isolates the runner-up's multiplier in the winner's price. Critical-base-bid payment is per-auction DSIC conditional on current multipliers, but does not establish dynamic truthfulness and does not repair base-value ranking disagreement.

As LLMs occupy an increasingly important role in society, they are more and more confronted with questions that require them not only to draw on their general knowledge but also to align with certain human value systems. Therefore, studying the alignment of LLMs with human values has become a crucial field of inquiry. Prior work, however, mostly focuses on evaluating the alignment of fully trained models, overlooking the training dynamics by which models learn to express human values. In this work, we investigate how and at which stage value alignment arises during the course of a model's post-training. Our analysis disentangles the effects of post-training algorithms and datasets, measuring both the magnitude and time of value drifts during training. Experimenting with Llama-3 and Qwen-3 models of different sizes and popular supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and preference optimization datasets and algorithms, we find that the SFT phase generally establishes a model's values, and subsequent preference optimization rarely re-aligns these values. Furthermore, using a synthetic preference dataset that enables controlled manipulation of values, we find that different preference optimization algorithms lead to different value alignment outcomes, even when preference data is held constant. Our findings provide actionable insights into how values are learned during post-training and help to inform data curation, as well as the selection of models and algorithms for preference optimization to improve model alignment to human values.

Existing work on value alignment typically characterizes value relations statically, ignoring how interventions - such as prompting, fine-tuning, or preference optimization - reshape the broader value system. We introduce the Value Alignment Tax (VAT), a framework that measures how alignment-induced changes propagate across interconnected values relative to achieved on-target gain. VAT captures the dynamics of value expression under alignment pressure. Using a controlled scenario-action dataset grounded in Schwartz value theory, we collect paired pre-post normative judgments and analyze alignment effects across models, values, and alignment strategies. Our results show that alignment often produces uneven, structured co-movement among values. These effects are invisible under conventional target-only evaluation, revealing systemic, process-level alignment risks and offering new insights into the dynamics of value alignment in LLMs.

In this paper we argue for the fundamental importance of the value distribution: the distribution of the random return received by a reinforcement learning agent. This is in contrast to the common approach to reinforcement learning which models the expectation of this return, or value. Although there is an established body of literature studying the value distribution, thus far it has always been used for a specific purpose such as implementing risk-aware behaviour. We begin with theoretical results in both the policy evaluation and control settings, exposing a significant distributional instability in the latter. We then use the distributional perspective to design a new algorithm which applies Bellman's equation to the learning of approximate value distributions. We evaluate our algorithm using the suite of games from the Arcade Learning Environment. We obtain both state-of-the-art results and anecdotal evidence demonstrating the importance of the value distribution in approximate reinforcement learning. Finally, we combine theoretical and empirical evidence to highlight the ways in which the value distribution impacts learning in the approximate setting.

We propose Reinforcement Learning with Explicit Human Values (RLEV), a method that aligns Large Language Model (LLM) optimization directly with quantifiable human value signals. While Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) effectively trains models in objective domains using binary correctness rewards, it overlooks that not all tasks are equally significant. RLEV extends this framework by incorporating human-defined value signals directly into the reward function. Using exam-style data with explicit ground-truth value labels, RLEV consistently outperforms correctness-only baselines across multiple RL algorithms and model scales. Crucially, RLEV policies not only improve value-weighted accuracy but also learn a value-sensitive termination policy: concise for low-value prompts, thorough for high-value ones. We demonstrate this behavior stems from value-weighted gradient amplification on end-of-sequence tokens. Ablation studies confirm the gain is causally linked to value alignment. RLEV remains robust under noisy value signals, such as difficulty-based labels, demonstrating that optimizing for an explicit utility function offers a practical path to aligning LLMs with human priorities.

Object-centric architectures usually apply a differentiable module to the entire feature map to decompose it into sets of entity representations called slots. Some of these methods structurally resemble clustering algorithms, where the cluster's center in latent space serves as a slot representation. Slot Attention is an example of such a method, acting as a learnable analog of the soft k-means algorithm. Our work employs a learnable clustering method based on the Gaussian Mixture Model. Unlike other approaches, we represent slots not only as centers of clusters but also incorporate information about the distance between clusters and assigned vectors, leading to more expressive slot representations. Our experiments demonstrate that using this approach instead of Slot Attention improves performance in object-centric scenarios, achieving state-of-the-art results in the set property prediction task.

Developing deep learning models that effectively learn object-centric representations, akin to human cognition, remains a challenging task. Existing approaches facilitate object discovery by representing objects as fixed-size vectors, called ``slots'' or ``object files''. While these approaches have shown promise in certain scenarios, they still exhibit certain limitations. First, they rely on architectural priors which can be unreliable and usually require meticulous engineering to identify the correct objects. Second, there has been a notable gap in investigating the practical utility of these representations in downstream tasks. To address the first limitation, we introduce a method that explicitly optimizes the constraint that each object in a scene should be associated with a distinct slot. We formalize this constraint by introducing consistency objectives which are cyclic in nature. By integrating these consistency objectives into various existing slot-based object-centric methods, we showcase substantial improvements in object-discovery performance. These enhancements consistently hold true across both synthetic and real-world scenes, underscoring the effectiveness and adaptability of the proposed approach. To tackle the second limitation, we apply the learned object-centric representations from the proposed method to two downstream reinforcement learning tasks, demonstrating considerable performance enhancements compared to conventional slot-based and monolithic representation learning methods. Our results suggest that the proposed approach not only improves object discovery, but also provides richer features for downstream tasks.

The extraction of modular object-centric representations for downstream tasks is an emerging area of research. Learning grounded representations of objects that are guaranteed to be stable and invariant promises robust performance across different tasks and environments. Slot Attention (SA) learns object-centric representations by assigning objects to slots, but presupposes a single distribution from which all slots are randomly initialised. This results in an inability to learn specialized slots which bind to specific object types and remain invariant to identity-preserving changes in object appearance. To address this, we present \textsc{Conditional Slot Attention} (CoSA) using a novel concept of Grounded Slot Dictionary (GSD) inspired by vector quantization. Our proposed GSD comprises (i) canonical object-level property vectors and (ii) parametric Gaussian distributions, which define a prior over the slots. We demonstrate the benefits of our method in multiple downstream tasks such as scene generation, composition, and task adaptation, whilst remaining competitive with SA in popular object discovery benchmarks.

Major Internet advertising platforms offer budget pacing tools as a standard service for advertisers to manage their ad campaigns. Given the inherent non-stationarity in an advertiser's value and also competing advertisers' values over time, a commonly used approach is to learn a target expenditure plan that specifies a target spend as a function of time, and then run a controller that tracks this plan. This raises the question: how many historical samples are required to learn a good expenditure plan? We study this question by considering an advertiser repeatedly participating in T second-price auctions, where the tuple of her value and the highest competing bid is drawn from an unknown time-varying distribution. The advertiser seeks to maximize her total utility subject to her budget constraint. Prior work has shown the sufficiency of Tlog T samples per distribution to achieve the optimal O(T)-regret. We dramatically improve this state-of-the-art and show that just one sample per distribution is enough to achieve the near-optimal tilde O(T)-regret, while still being robust to noise in the sampling distributions.

While social media feed rankings are primarily driven by engagement signals rather than any explicit value system, the resulting algorithmic feeds are not value-neutral: engagement may prioritize specific individualistic values. This paper presents an approach for social media feed value alignment. We adopt Schwartz's theory of Basic Human Values -- a broad set of human values that articulates complementary and opposing values forming the building blocks of many cultures -- and we implement an algorithmic approach that models and then ranks feeds by expressions of Schwartz's values in social media posts. Our approach enables controls where users can express weights on their desired values, combining these weights and post value expressions into a ranking that respects users' articulated trade-offs. Through controlled experiments (N=141 and N=250), we demonstrate that users can use these controls to architect feeds reflecting their desired values. Across users, value-ranked feeds align with personal values, diverging substantially from existing engagement-driven feeds.

We study the problem of fairly allocating indivisible goods among a set of agents. Our focus is on the existence of allocations that give each agent their maximin fair share--the value they are guaranteed if they divide the goods into as many bundles as there are agents, and receive their lowest valued bundle. An MMS allocation is one where every agent receives at least their maximin fair share. We examine the existence of such allocations when agents have cost utilities. In this setting, each item has an associated cost, and an agent's valuation for an item is the cost of the item if it is useful to them, and zero otherwise. Our main results indicate that cost utilities are a promising restriction for achieving MMS. We show that for the case of three agents with cost utilities, an MMS allocation always exists. We also show that when preferences are restricted slightly further--to what we call laminar set approvals--we can guarantee MMS allocations for any number of agents. Finally, we explore if it is possible to guarantee each agent their maximin fair share while using a strategyproof mechanism.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming diverse fields and gaining increasing influence as human proxies. This development underscores the urgent need for evaluating value orientations and understanding of LLMs to ensure their responsible integration into public-facing applications. This work introduces ValueBench, the first comprehensive psychometric benchmark for evaluating value orientations and value understanding in LLMs. ValueBench collects data from 44 established psychometric inventories, encompassing 453 multifaceted value dimensions. We propose an evaluation pipeline grounded in realistic human-AI interactions to probe value orientations, along with novel tasks for evaluating value understanding in an open-ended value space. With extensive experiments conducted on six representative LLMs, we unveil their shared and distinctive value orientations and exhibit their ability to approximate expert conclusions in value-related extraction and generation tasks. ValueBench is openly accessible at https://github.com/Value4AI/ValueBench.

The widespread application of Large Language Models (LLMs) across various tasks and fields has necessitated the alignment of these models with human values and preferences. Given various approaches of human value alignment, ranging from Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF), to constitutional learning, etc. there is an urgent need to understand the scope and nature of human values injected into these models before their release. There is also a need for model alignment without a costly large scale human annotation effort. We propose UniVaR, a high-dimensional representation of human value distributions in LLMs, orthogonal to model architecture and training data. Trained from the value-relevant output of eight multilingual LLMs and tested on the output from four multilingual LLMs, namely LlaMA2, ChatGPT, JAIS and Yi, we show that UniVaR is a powerful tool to compare the distribution of human values embedded in different LLMs with different langauge sources. Through UniVaR, we explore how different LLMs prioritize various values in different languages and cultures, shedding light on the complex interplay between human values and language modeling.

Emotional support dialogue systems aim to reduce help-seekers' distress and help them overcome challenges. While human valuesx2013core beliefs that shape an individual's prioritiesx2013are increasingly emphasized in contemporary psychological therapy for their role in fostering internal transformation and long-term emotional well-being, their integration into emotional support systems remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we present a value-driven method for training emotional support dialogue systems designed to reinforce positive values in seekers. Notably, our model identifies which values to reinforce at each turn and how to do so, by leveraging online support conversations from Reddit. We evaluate the method across support skills, seekers' emotional intensity, and value reinforcement. Our method consistently outperforms various baselines, effectively exploring and eliciting values from seekers. Additionally, leveraging crowd knowledge from Reddit significantly enhances its effectiveness. Therapists highlighted its ability to validate seekers' challenges and emphasize positive aspects of their situationsx2013both crucial elements of value reinforcement. Our work, being the first to integrate value reinforcement into emotional support systems, demonstrates its promise and establishes a foundation for future research.

The alignment problem in the context of large language models must consider the plurality of human values in our world. Whilst there are many resonant and overlapping values amongst the world's cultures, there are also many conflicting, yet equally valid, values. It is important to observe which cultural values a model exhibits, particularly when there is a value conflict between input prompts and generated outputs. We discuss how the co-creation of language and cultural value impacts large language models (LLMs). We explore the constitution of the training data for GPT-3 and compare that to the world's language and internet access demographics, as well as to reported statistical profiles of dominant values in some Nation-states. We stress tested GPT-3 with a range of value-rich texts representing several languages and nations; including some with values orthogonal to dominant US public opinion as reported by the World Values Survey. We observed when values embedded in the input text were mutated in the generated outputs and noted when these conflicting values were more aligned with reported dominant US values. Our discussion of these results uses a moral value pluralism (MVP) lens to better understand these value mutations. Finally, we provide recommendations for how our work may contribute to other current work in the field.

In Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), constructing a robust advantage baseline is critical for policy gradients, effectively guiding the policy model to reinforce desired behaviors. Recent research has introduced Generalist Value Models (such as V_0), which achieve pre-trained value estimation by explicitly encoding model capabilities in-context, eliminating the need to synchronously update the value model alongside the policy model. In this paper, we propose V_{0.5}, which adaptively fuses the baseline predicted by such value model (acting as a prior) with the empirical mean derived from sparse rollouts. This constructs a robust baseline that balances computational efficiency with extremely low variance. Specifically, we introduce a real-time statistical testing and dynamic budget allocation. This balances the high variance caused by sparse sampling against the systematic bias (or hallucinations) inherent in the value model's prior. By constructing a hypothesis test to evaluate the prior's reliability in real-time, the system dynamically allocates additional rollout budget on demand. This mechanism minimizes the baseline estimator's Mean Squared Error (MSE), guaranteeing stable policy gradients, even under extreme sparsity with a group size of 4. Extensive evaluations across six mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that V_{0.5} significantly outperforms GRPO and DAPO, achieving faster convergence and over some 10% performance improvement.

Navigating high-stakes dilemmas involving conflicting values is challenging even for humans, let alone for AI. Yet prior work in evaluating the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in such situations has been limited to everyday scenarios. To close this gap, this work first introduces CLASH (Character perspective-based LLM Assessments in Situations with High-stakes), a meticulously curated dataset consisting of 345 high-impact dilemmas along with 3,795 individual perspectives of diverse values. In particular, we design CLASH in a way to support the study of critical aspects of value-based decision-making processes which are missing from prior work, including understanding decision ambivalence and psychological discomfort as well as capturing the temporal shifts of values in characters' perspectives. By benchmarking 10 open and closed frontier models, we uncover several key findings. (1) Even the strongest models, such as GPT-4o and Claude-Sonnet, achieve less than 50% accuracy in identifying situations where the decision should be ambivalent, while they perform significantly better in clear-cut scenarios. (2) While LLMs reasonably predict psychological discomfort as marked by human, they inadequately comprehend perspectives involving value shifts, indicating a need for LLMs to reason over complex values. (3) Our experiments also reveal a significant correlation between LLMs' value preferences and their steerability towards a given value. (4) Finally, LLMs exhibit greater steerability when engaged in value reasoning from a third-party perspective, compared to a first-person setup, though certain value pairs benefit uniquely from the first-person framing.

While household robots are often evaluated based on task completion, everyday domestic environments involve value-conflicting situations in which robots are expected to choose actions that prioritize other values than task success, such as human autonomy, efficiency, or social appropriateness. Yet, there are no benchmarks for evaluating robots' value preferences in such scenarios. We introduce RobotValues, a benchmark to evaluate household robot planners in 10K value-conflict scenarios. Each instance consists of a realistic household image with multiple plausible robot actions that prioritize different human values. We construct RobotValues through LLM-assisted scenario generation, stakeholder-grounded value extraction, image generation and automatic quality control. Using RobotValues we evaluate VLMs used in robotics and find that models exhibit default value preferences, including safety and accommodation, while underselecting privacy-prioritizing actions. When the models are instructed to prioritize specific values that conflict with their own preferences, they often fail to override their default actions, choosing incorrect actions for 80% of the time. These findings suggest that household robot evaluation should measure not only task completion or safety compliance, but also whether robots can choose among plausible actions when human values conflict.

We present a general convergent class of reinforcement learning algorithms that is founded on two distinct principles: (1) mapping value estimates to a different space using arbitrary functions from a broad class, and (2) linearly decomposing the reward signal into multiple channels. The first principle enables incorporating specific properties into the value estimator that can enhance learning. The second principle, on the other hand, allows for the value function to be represented as a composition of multiple utility functions. This can be leveraged for various purposes, e.g. dealing with highly varying reward scales, incorporating a priori knowledge about the sources of reward, and ensemble learning. Combining the two principles yields a general blueprint for instantiating convergent algorithms by orchestrating diverse mapping functions over multiple reward channels. This blueprint generalizes and subsumes algorithms such as Q-Learning, Log Q-Learning, and Q-Decomposition. In addition, our convergence proof for this general class relaxes certain required assumptions in some of these algorithms. Based on our theory, we discuss several interesting configurations as special cases. Finally, to illustrate the potential of the design space that our theory opens up, we instantiate a particular algorithm and evaluate its performance on the Atari suite.

Large language models (LLMs) can express different values in two distinct ways: (1) intrinsic expression, reflecting the model's inherent values learned during training, and (2) prompted expression, elicited by explicit prompts. Given their widespread use in value alignment and persona steering, it is paramount to clearly understand their underlying mechanisms, particularly whether they mostly overlap (as one might expect) or rely on substantially different mechanisms, but this remains largely understudied. We analyze this at the mechanistic level using two approaches: (1) value vectors, feature directions representing value mechanisms extracted from the residual stream, and (2) value neurons, MLP neurons that contribute to value expressions. We demonstrate that intrinsic and prompted value mechanisms partly share common components that are crucial for inducing value expression, but also possess unique elements that manifest in different ways. As a result, these mechanisms lead to different degrees of value steerability (prompted > intrinsic) and response diversity (intrinsic > prompted). In particular, components unique to the intrinsic mechanism seem to promote lexical diversity in responses, whereas those specific to the prompted mechanism primarily strengthen instruction following, taking effect even in distant tasks like jailbreaking.

The prevalence and importance of algorithmic two-sided marketplaces has drawn attention to the issue of fairness in such settings. Algorithmic decisions are used in assigning students to schools, users to advertisers, and applicants to job interviews. These decisions should heed the preferences of individuals, and simultaneously be fair with respect to their merits (synonymous with fit, future performance, or need). Merits conditioned on observable features are always uncertain, a fact that is exacerbated by the widespread use of machine learning algorithms to infer merit from the observables. As our key contribution, we carefully axiomatize a notion of individual fairness in the two-sided marketplace setting which respects the uncertainty in the merits; indeed, it simultaneously recognizes uncertainty as the primary potential cause of unfairness and an approach to address it. We design a linear programming framework to find fair utility-maximizing distributions over allocations, and we show that the linear program is robust to perturbations in the estimated parameters of the uncertain merit distributions, a key property in combining the approach with machine learning techniques.

Learning object-centric representations of complex scenes is a promising step towards enabling efficient abstract reasoning from low-level perceptual features. Yet, most deep learning approaches learn distributed representations that do not capture the compositional properties of natural scenes. In this paper, we present the Slot Attention module, an architectural component that interfaces with perceptual representations such as the output of a convolutional neural network and produces a set of task-dependent abstract representations which we call slots. These slots are exchangeable and can bind to any object in the input by specializing through a competitive procedure over multiple rounds of attention. We empirically demonstrate that Slot Attention can extract object-centric representations that enable generalization to unseen compositions when trained on unsupervised object discovery and supervised property prediction tasks.

In some games, additional information hurts a player, e.g., in games with first-mover advantage, the second-mover is hurt by seeing the first-mover's move. What properties of a game determine whether it has such negative "value of information" for a particular player? Can a game have negative value of information for all players? To answer such questions, we generalize the definition of marginal utility of a good to define the marginal utility of a parameter vector specifying a game. So rather than analyze the global structure of the relationship between a game's parameter vector and player behavior, as in previous work, we focus on the local structure of that relationship. This allows us to prove that generically, every game can have negative marginal value of information, unless one imposes a priori constraints on allowed changes to the game's parameter vector. We demonstrate these and related results numerically, and discuss their implications.

Reinforcement learning algorithms for Large Language Models (LLMs) are largely distinguished by their variance reduction strategy. Group-relative methods like GRPO reduce gradient variance by sampling multiple rollouts per prompt, but provide only sequence-level credit. Training is also blocked by straggler rollouts, reducing throughput and increasing off-policyness. Learned value functions theoretically address both problems, providing token-level advantages without requiring large groups. However, additional infrastructure engineering challenges combined with the practical success of critic-free methods have made it difficult to justify their inclusion in RL pipelines. We propose two complementary strategies to improve the performance of value function RL: 1) Privileged Value Functions (PVF) which provide an elegant mechanism to inject additional task-relevant token-level signal without biasing the policy objective; 2) TETHER, a baseline that adaptively interpolates between group-relative and value baselines depending on the value function accuracy. Across several reasoning tasks, both strategies consistently improve over the standard value function baseline, and are competitive with or outperform mean-baseline GRPO.

Value alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) has been shown to be culturally biased toward Western norms. This results in the mishandling of local values in multilingual societies such as Sri Lanka that have their unique cultural dynamics. Existing benchmarks overlook Sri Lankan-contextualized values in its official language Sinhala, hindering culturally sensitive evaluation and fine-tuning. To bridge this gap, we propose LKValues, the first survey-grounded resource suite for Sri Lankan value alignment. From a trilingual survey of 205 respondents, blending adapted global frameworks and LLM-elicited local constructs, we derive 40 majority-endorsed societal values. Using these values, we construct LKvaluesIT, a Sinhala-English news-derived instruction corpus containing 150k scenario-based instances, and LKvaluesBench, a value-sensitive evaluation benchmark of 1,000 instances. We evaluate a set of proprietary and open-weight LLMs with LKvaluesBench. We fine-tune three open-weight base models (Qwen3.5-4B-Base, Qwen3.5-9B-Base, and Aya-Expanse-8B-Base). Our experiments show that newer and larger LLMs still exhibit low-resource and cultural value-alignment gaps. LKValues fine-tuning improves Qwen-family models in English and Sinhala, reducing invalid outputs and cross-lingual disparities, though gains remain model-family dependent. These highlight LKValues efficacy in embedding Sri Lankan values, offering a replicable pipeline for low-resource, country-specific pluralist value alignment. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/NextME14/LKValues.

The choice of representation plays a key role in self-driving. Bird's eye view (BEV) representations have shown remarkable performance in recent years. In this paper, we propose to learn object-centric representations in BEV to distill a complex scene into more actionable information for self-driving. We first learn to place objects into slots with a slot attention model on BEV sequences. Based on these object-centric representations, we then train a transformer to learn to drive as well as reason about the future of other vehicles. We found that object-centric slot representations outperform both scene-level and object-level approaches that use the exact attributes of objects. Slot representations naturally incorporate information about objects from their spatial and temporal context such as position, heading, and speed without explicitly providing it. Our model with slots achieves an increased completion rate of the provided routes and, consequently, a higher driving score, with a lower variance across multiple runs, affirming slots as a reliable alternative in object-centric approaches. Additionally, we validate our model's performance as a world model through forecasting experiments, demonstrating its capability to predict future slot representations accurately. The code and the pre-trained models can be found at https://kuis-ai.github.io/CarFormer/.

The majority of online display ads are served through real-time bidding (RTB) --- each ad display impression is auctioned off in real-time when it is just being generated from a user visit. To place an ad automatically and optimally, it is critical for advertisers to devise a learning algorithm to cleverly bid an ad impression in real-time. Most previous works consider the bid decision as a static optimization problem of either treating the value of each impression independently or setting a bid price to each segment of ad volume. However, the bidding for a given ad campaign would repeatedly happen during its life span before the budget runs out. As such, each bid is strategically correlated by the constrained budget and the overall effectiveness of the campaign (e.g., the rewards from generated clicks), which is only observed after the campaign has completed. Thus, it is of great interest to devise an optimal bidding strategy sequentially so that the campaign budget can be dynamically allocated across all the available impressions on the basis of both the immediate and future rewards. In this paper, we formulate the bid decision process as a reinforcement learning problem, where the state space is represented by the auction information and the campaign's real-time parameters, while an action is the bid price to set. By modeling the state transition via auction competition, we build a Markov Decision Process framework for learning the optimal bidding policy to optimize the advertising performance in the dynamic real-time bidding environment. Furthermore, the scalability problem from the large real-world auction volume and campaign budget is well handled by state value approximation using neural networks.

Recursive retraining of generative models poses a critical representation challenge: when synthetic outputs are curated based on a fixed reward signal, the model tends to collapse onto a narrow set of outputs that over-optimize that objective. Prior work suggests that such collapse is unavoidable without adding real data into the mix. We revisit this conclusion from an alignment perspective and show that collapse can be mitigated through curation based on multiple reward functions. We formalize the dynamics of recursive training under heterogeneous preferences and prove that, under certain conditions, the model converges to a stable distribution that allocates probability mass across competing high-reward regions. The limiting distribution preserves diversity and provably satisfies a weighted Nash bargaining solution, offering a formal interpretation of value aggregation in synthetic retraining loops.

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human values has attracted increasing attention since it provides clarity, transparency, and the ability to adapt to evolving scenarios. In this paper, we introduce a Controlled Value Vector Activation (ConVA) method that directly aligns the internal values of LLMs by interpreting how a value is encoded in their latent representations and modifies relevant activations to ensure consistent values in LLMs. To ensure an accurate and unbiased interpretation, we propose a context-controlled value vector identification method. To consistently control values without sacrificing model performance, we introduce a gated value vector activation method for effective and minimum degree of value control. Experiments show that our method achieves the highest control success rate across 10 basic values without hurting LLM performance and fluency, and ensures target values even with opposite and potentially malicious input prompts. Source code and data are available at~ https://github.com/hr-jin/ConVA.

Large language models (LLMs) are used worldwide, yet disproportionately reflect Western values, limiting their ability to represent diverse value systems. We introduce PLURAL, a large-scale, value-focused preference dataset grounded in the Integrated Values Survey (IVS), a nationally representative survey spanning 92 countries. Using a two-stage generation pipeline, we transform survey responses into synthetic preference triplets that preserve normative value signals while producing realistic scenarios. We release an initial version of PLURAL containing ~500,000 preference triplets representing people in 20 diverse countries. We evaluate PLURAL in three ways: (i) dataset-level validation showing that it preserves both cross-country value differences and within-country diversity from the original survey; (ii) automated evaluation showing that training on PLURAL improves alignment with target countries' cultural profiles, reducing mean absolute error by up to 27.7% relative to strong baselines; and (iii) blind human evaluation with 176 evaluators in India, Brazil, and Japan, who judge PLURAL-aligned responses as more representative of their national values. Together, these results show that PLURAL contains learnable signal for value steering, offering a scalable resource for pluralistic alignment. Dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/agdhruv/plural-alignment

Detecting AI risks becomes more challenging as stronger models emerge and find novel methods such as Alignment Faking to circumvent these detection attempts. Inspired by how risky behaviors in humans (i.e., illegal activities that may hurt others) are sometimes guided by strongly-held values, we believe that identifying values within AI models can be an early warning system for AI's risky behaviors. We create LitmusValues, an evaluation pipeline to reveal AI models' priorities on a range of AI value classes. Then, we collect AIRiskDilemmas, a diverse collection of dilemmas that pit values against one another in scenarios relevant to AI safety risks such as Power Seeking. By measuring an AI model's value prioritization using its aggregate choices, we obtain a self-consistent set of predicted value priorities that uncover potential risks. We show that values in LitmusValues (including seemingly innocuous ones like Care) can predict for both seen risky behaviors in AIRiskDilemmas and unseen risky behaviors in HarmBench.

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has become a dominating strategy in steering Language Models (LMs) towards human values/goals. The key to the strategy is employing a reward model ({varphi}) which can reflect a latent reward model with humans. While this strategy has proven to be effective, the training methodology requires a lot of human preference annotation (usually of the order of tens of thousands) to train {varphi}. Such large-scale preference annotations can be achievable if the reward model can be ubiquitously used. However, human values/goals are subjective and depend on the nature of the task. This poses a challenge in collecting diverse preferences for downstream applications. To address this, we propose a novel methodology to infuse domain knowledge into {varphi}, which reduces the size of preference annotation required. We validate our approach in E-Commerce Opinion Summarization, with a significant reduction in dataset size (just 940 samples) while advancing the state-of-the-art. Our contributions include a novel Reward Modelling technique, a new dataset (PromptOpinSumm) for Opinion Summarization, and a human preference dataset (OpinPref). The proposed methodology opens avenues for efficient RLHF, making it more adaptable to diverse applications with varying human values. We release the artifacts for usage under MIT License.

Existing human value datasets do not directly support value understanding in factual news: many are actor-agnostic, rely on isolated utterances or synthetic scenarios, and lack explicit event structure or value direction. We present NEVU (News Event-centric Value Understanding), a benchmark for actor-conditioned, event-centric, and direction-aware human value recognition in factual news. NEVU evaluates whether models can identify value cues, attribute them to the correct actor, and determine value direction from grounded evidence. Built from 2{,}865 English news articles, NEVU organizes annotations at four semantic unit levels (Subevent, behavior-based composite event, story-based composite event, and Article) and labels (unit, actor) pairs for fine-grained evaluation across local and composite contexts. The annotations are produced through an LLM-assisted pipeline with staged verification and targeted human auditing. Using a hierarchical value space with 54 fine-grained values and 20 coarse-grained categories, NEVU covers 45{,}793 unit--actor pairs and 168{,}061 directed value instances. We provide unified baselines for proprietary and open-source LLMs, and find that lightweight adaptation (LoRA) consistently improves open-source models, showing that although NEVU is designed primarily as a benchmark, it also supports supervised adaptation beyond prompting-only evaluation. Data availability is described in Appendix~app:data_code_availability.

We present a Spades bidding algorithm that is superior to recreational human players and to publicly available bots. Like in Bridge, the game of Spades is composed of two independent phases, bidding and playing. This paper focuses on the bidding algorithm, since this phase holds a precise challenge: based on the input, choose the bid that maximizes the agent's winning probability. Our Bidding-in-Spades (BIS) algorithm heuristically determines the bidding strategy by comparing the expected utility of each possible bid. A major challenge is how to estimate these expected utilities. To this end, we propose a set of domain-specific heuristics, and then correct them via machine learning using data from real-world players. The \BIS algorithm we present can be attached to any playing algorithm. It beats rule-based bidding bots when all use the same playing component. When combined with a rule-based playing algorithm, it is superior to the average recreational human.

Relevance and utility are two frequently used measures to evaluate the effectiveness of an information retrieval (IR) system. Relevance emphasizes the aboutness of a result to a query, while utility refers to the result's usefulness or value to an information seeker. In Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), high-utility results should be prioritized to feed to LLMs due to their limited input bandwidth. Re-examining RAG's three core components -- relevance ranking derived from retrieval models, utility judgments, and answer generation -- aligns with Schutz's philosophical system of relevances, which encompasses three types of relevance representing different levels of human cognition that enhance each other. These three RAG components also reflect three cognitive levels for LLMs in question-answering. Therefore, we propose an Iterative utiliTy judgmEnt fraMework (ITEM) to promote each step in RAG. We conducted extensive experiments on retrieval (TREC DL, WebAP), utility judgment task (GTI-NQ), and factoid question-answering (NQ) datasets. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements of ITEM in utility judgments, ranking, and answer generation upon representative baselines.

As post-training processes utilize increasingly large datasets and base models continue to grow in size, the computational demands and implementation challenges of existing algorithms are escalating significantly. In this paper, we propose modeling the changes at the logits level during post-training using a separate neural network (i.e., the value network). After training this network on a small base model using demonstrations, this network can be seamlessly integrated with other pre-trained models during inference, enables them to achieve similar capability enhancements. We systematically investigate the best practices for this paradigm in terms of pre-training weights and connection schemes. We demonstrate that the resulting value network has broad transferability across pre-trained models of different parameter sizes within the same family, models undergoing continuous pre-training within the same family, and models with different vocabularies across families. In certain cases, it can achieve performance comparable to full-parameter fine-tuning. Furthermore, we explore methods to enhance the transferability of the value model and prevent overfitting to the base model used during training.

As we increasingly seek guidance from LLMs for decision-making in daily life, many of these decisions are not clear-cut and depend significantly on the personal values and ethical standards of the users. We present DailyDilemmas, a dataset of 1,360 moral dilemmas encountered in everyday life. Each dilemma includes two possible actions and with each action, the affected parties and human values invoked. Based on these dilemmas, we consolidated a set of human values across everyday topics e.g., interpersonal relationships, workplace, and environmental issues. We evaluated LLMs on these dilemmas to determine what action they will take and the values represented by these actions. Then, we analyzed these values through the lens of five popular theories inspired by sociology, psychology and philosophy. These theories are: World Value Survey, Moral Foundation Theory, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, Aristotle's Virtues, and Plutchik Wheel of Emotion. We find that LLMs are most aligned with the self-expression over survival values in terms of World Value Survey, care over loyalty in Moral Foundation Theory. Interestingly, we find large preferences differences in models for some core values such as truthfulness e.g., Mixtral-8x7B model tends to neglect it by 9.7% while GPT-4-turbo model tends to select it by 9.4%. We also study the recent guidance released by OpenAI (ModelSpec), and Anthropic (Constitutional AI) to understand how their released principles reflect their actual value prioritization when facing nuanced moral reasoning in daily-life settings. We find that end users cannot effectively steer such prioritization using system prompts.

A growing trend for value-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms is to capture more information than scalar value functions in the value network. One of the most well-known methods in this branch is distributional RL, which models return distribution instead of scalar value. In another line of work, hybrid reward architectures (HRA) in RL have studied to model source-specific value functions for each source of reward, which is also shown to be beneficial in performance. To fully inherit the benefits of distributional RL and hybrid reward architectures, we introduce Multi-Dimensional Distributional DQN (MD3QN), which extends distributional RL to model the joint return distribution from multiple reward sources. As a by-product of joint distribution modeling, MD3QN can capture not only the randomness in returns for each source of reward, but also the rich reward correlation between the randomness of different sources. We prove the convergence for the joint distributional Bellman operator and build our empirical algorithm by minimizing the Maximum Mean Discrepancy between joint return distribution and its Bellman target. In experiments, our method accurately models the joint return distribution in environments with richly correlated reward functions, and outperforms previous RL methods utilizing multi-dimensional reward functions in the control setting.

People use language models for practical questions whose answers are difficult to verify. We show that models exhibit covert value leakage: the information they provide is influenced by their own values, without this influence being disclosed to the user. In one of our evaluations, the user is considering investing in an AI company and wants to know how likely the AI bubble is to pop. Claude Opus 4.8 gives a lower probability when the company under consideration is Anthropic rather than OpenAI. Yet Claude mostly fails to disclose this influence to the user. Covert value leakage is a form of misalignment because it goes against the user's preferences and is likely to mislead them. To investigate this phenomenon, we introduce a suite of evaluations to quantify value leakage and whether models disclose it. We find that models are influenced by different types of values, including preferences for morally good outcomes, for the company that developed them, and for some human leisure activities over others. We often observe large differences among frontier models on the same evaluation. For example, on a Fermi-estimation task, Claude models falsely claim to give unbiased answers in their chain-of-thought, while Qwen models explain how their values bias their answers. Value leakage is a failure mode distinct from sycophancy and reward hacking, and current alignment training and evaluations do not adequately address it.

Drafting, i.e., the selection of a subset of items from a larger candidate set, is a key element of many games and related problems. It encompasses team formation in sports or e-sports, as well as deck selection in many modern card games. The key difficulty of drafting is that it is typically not sufficient to simply evaluate each item in a vacuum and to select the best items. The evaluation of an item depends on the context of the set of items that were already selected earlier, as the value of a set is not just the sum of the values of its members - it must include a notion of how well items go together. In this paper, we study drafting in the context of the card game Magic: The Gathering. We propose the use of a contextual preference network, which learns to compare two possible extensions of a given deck of cards. We demonstrate that the resulting network is better able to evaluate card decks in this game than previous attempts.

We present VAPO, Value-based Augmented Proximal Policy Optimization framework for reasoning models., a novel framework tailored for reasoning models within the value-based paradigm. Benchmarked the AIME 2024 dataset, VAPO, built on the Qwen 32B pre-trained model, attains a state-of-the-art score of 60.4. In direct comparison under identical experimental settings, VAPO outperforms the previously reported results of DeepSeek-R1-Zero-Qwen-32B and DAPO by more than 10 points. The training process of VAPO stands out for its stability and efficiency. It reaches state-of-the-art performance within a mere 5,000 steps. Moreover, across multiple independent runs, no training crashes occur, underscoring its reliability. This research delves into long chain-of-thought (long-CoT) reasoning using a value-based reinforcement learning framework. We pinpoint three key challenges that plague value-based methods: value model bias, the presence of heterogeneous sequence lengths, and the sparsity of reward signals. Through systematic design, VAPO offers an integrated solution that effectively alleviates these challenges, enabling enhanced performance in long-CoT reasoning tasks.

The escalating demand for Machine Learning (ML) training resources in recent years has resulted in a substantial gap between the high demand and the available supply. Efficient allocation of these scarce and expensive resources is crucial for organizations to maximize their return on investment. Existing resource allocation mechanisms, like Karma [OSDI'23], are designed to guarantee Pareto efficiency and max-min fairness in settings with dynamic (time-varying) user demands, but fail to preserve these key properties in the presence of demands with heterogeneous values. Given the ubiquity and inevitability of heterogeneity in organizational values of different workloads, effective resource allocation policies must accommodate these variations. In this paper, we describe the design, implementation, deployment, and theoretical analysis of Quota Marketplace, a market-based mechanism to efficiently allocate ML training chips (like GPUs), explicitly addressing scenarios with demands of heterogeneous value. We detail the implementation of this mechanism within Google and present metrics that demonstrate its impact. We also discuss many business-critical requirements that the Quota Marketplace handles quite effectively, and document the gains and opportunities it has unlocked. We establish theoretically how this market-based approach achieves the essential properties of Pareto efficiency and max-min fairness by allowing the users to express the value of their workloads and enabling dynamic resource pricing based on supply and demand fluctuations. Ultimately, the market facilitates resource allocation that aligns with organizational priorities.

Data valuation is essential for enhancing the transparency and accountability of large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs). However, existing methods typically rely on gradient computations, making them computationally prohibitive for billion-parameter models and precluding batch parallelization. In this work, we introduce For-Value, a forward-only data valuation framework that enables efficient batch-scalable value estimation while maintaining effectiveness. Leveraging the expressive power of pretrained LLMs/VLMs, we theoretically demonstrate that data valuation can be captured by the alignment between the final hidden representations and prediction errors at the last layer. In light of this insight, For-Value computes data value using a simple closed-form expression with a single forward pass, eliminating the need for costly backpropagation and enabling efficient batch calculating at scale. Extensive experiments show that For-Value matches or outperforms gradient-based baselines in detecting influential data and mislabeled data, while achieving significant efficiency improvements.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has enabled Large Language Models (LLMs) to achieve remarkable reasoning in domains like mathematics and coding, where verifiable rewards provide clear signals. However, extending this paradigm to financial decision is challenged by the market's stochastic nature: rewards are verifiable but inherently noisy, causing standard RL to degenerate into reward hacking. To address this, we propose Trade-R1, a model training framework that bridges verifiable rewards to stochastic environments via process-level reasoning verification. Our key innovation is a verification method that transforms the problem of evaluating reasoning over lengthy financial documents into a structured Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) task. We construct a triangular consistency metric, assessing pairwise alignment between retrieved evidence, reasoning chains, and decisions to serve as a validity filter for noisy market returns. We explore two reward integration strategies: Fixed-effect Semantic Reward (FSR) for stable alignment signals, and Dynamic-effect Semantic Reward (DSR) for coupled magnitude optimization. Experiments on different country asset selection demonstrate that our paradigm reduces reward hacking, with DSR achieving superior cross-market generalization while maintaining the highest reasoning consistency.

Budget management strategies in repeated auctions have received growing attention in online advertising markets. However, previous work on budget management in online bidding mainly focused on second-price auctions. The rapid shift from second-price auctions to first-price auctions for online ads in recent years has motivated the challenging question of how to bid in repeated first-price auctions while controlling budgets. In this work, we study the problem of learning in repeated first-price auctions with budgets. We design a dual-based algorithm that can achieve a near-optimal O(T) regret with full information feedback where the maximum competing bid is always revealed after each auction. We further consider the setting with one-sided information feedback where only the winning bid is revealed after each auction. We show that our modified algorithm can still achieve an O(T) regret with mild assumptions on the bidder's value distribution. Finally, we complement the theoretical results with numerical experiments to confirm the effectiveness of our budget management policy.

General-purpose reward models are increasingly the bottleneck for scaling robot learning, yet the recipe for learning value-related capabilities from large-scale heterogeneous corpora remains underexplored. Existing approaches tie supervision to task-internal anchors such as preferences or normalized progress, none of which transfer cleanly across embodiments and data sources. We introduce RynnValue, an open-source value foundation model for robotic manipulation that replaces these anchors with temporal distance, the directed cost-to-go from an observation to the language-specified goal. Because temporal-distance labels can be derived directly from timestamps, RynnValue scales to over 7,000 hours and roughly 3M instruction-conditioned clips without preference or progress annotations. To make temporal-value learning reliable at scale, we combine random temporal sampling, temporal-order shuffling, and value-isolation attention, suppressing shortcuts that would leave predictions insensitive to failures and regressions. Trained without preference labels, RynnValue attains an average Kendall's tau_a of 0.675 on RBM-EVAL-OOD, surpassing the fully preference-supervised state of the art (0.655) and more than doubling a progress-only counterpart (0.292), while generalizing zero-shot to unseen tasks, embodiments, and viewpoints. Converted into dense rewards via potential-based shaping, it raises real-world policy success from 52.5% to 72.5% online and from 63.8% to 82.5% offline. These results establish temporal distance as a scalable supervision target and practical reward interface for generalist robot policies.

Autoregressive models (ARMs) are hindered by slow sequential inference. While masked diffusion models (MDMs) offer a parallel alternative, they suffer from critical drawbacks: high computational overhead from precluding Key-Value (KV) caching, and incoherent generation arising from learning dependencies over an intractable space of token combinations. To address these limitations, we introduce ReFusion, a novel masked diffusion model that achieves superior performance and efficiency by elevating parallel decoding from the token level to a higher slot level, where each slot is a fixed-length, contiguous sub-sequence. This is achieved through an iterative ``plan-and-infill'' decoding process: a diffusion-based planning step first identifies a set of weakly dependent slots, and an autoregressive infilling step then decodes these selected slots in parallel. The slot-based design simultaneously unlocks full KV cache reuse with a unified causal framework and reduces the learning complexity from the token combination space to a manageable slot-level permutation space. Extensive experiments on seven diverse benchmarks show that ReFusion not only overwhelmingly surpasses prior MDMs with 34% performance gains and an over 18times speedup on average, but also bridges the performance gap to strong ARMs while maintaining a 2.33times average speedup.

Agent frameworks increasingly package procedural knowledge as skills: instruction files an agent reads on demand, while public libraries now hold thousands of them. Which skill to read has thus become a decision the policy itself makes in the middle of an episode, yet no existing signal trains it. We show that the default remedy, outcome-rewarded RL over the candidate slate, cannot teach it, for a structural reason we identify and name selector credit starvation: under a broadcast, sequence-level advantage, the few tokens that name the chosen skill carry a vanishing share of the loss, and the credit they inherit is increasingly wrong-signed as trajectories lengthen. A correct choice is punished whenever the execution after it fails, even though the choice itself is among the most valuable decisions in the trajectory. Auditing a completed run's own training artifacts confirms all three properties, each worsening monotonically with horizon. SkillGate removes the failure by construction: it partitions the token support into two disjoint credit channels, outcome credit reaching only execution tokens, and a separate action-local advantage reaching exactly the skill-naming tokens, positive only when a trajectory's single read is the correct one. On five agentic benchmarks under a 16-candidate slate, SkillGate lifts a 9B policy from 40.8% to 53.2% trial success, well ahead of the identical budget spent on outcome reward alone, while cutting exposure to misleading candidates by two thirds and reading fewer skills.

Classical models of memory in psychology and neuroscience rely on similarity-based retrieval of stored patterns, where similarity is a function of retrieval cues and the stored patterns. While parsimonious, these models do not allow distinct representations for storage and retrieval, despite their distinct computational demands. Key-value memory systems, in contrast, distinguish representations used for storage (values) and those used for retrieval (keys). This allows key-value memory systems to optimize simultaneously for fidelity in storage and discriminability in retrieval. We review the computational foundations of key-value memory, its role in modern machine learning systems, related ideas from psychology and neuroscience, applications to a number of empirical puzzles, and possible biological implementations.

Detecting Schwartz values in political text is difficult because implicit cues often depend on surrounding arguments and fine-grained distinctions between neighboring values. We study when context and explicit moral knowledge help sentence-level value detection. Using the ValuesML/Touch{é} ValueEval format, we compare sentence, window, and full-document inputs; no-RAG and retrieval-augmented settings with a curated moral knowledge base; supervised DeBERTa-v3-base/large encoders; and zero-shot LLMs from 12B to 123B parameters. The results show that more context is not uniformly better: full-document context improves supervised DeBERTa encoders by 3.8--4.8 macro-F1 points over sentence-only input, but does not consistently help zero-shot LLMs. Retrieved moral knowledge is more consistently useful in matched comparisons, improving each tested model family and context condition under early fusion. However, scaling from DeBERTa-v3-base to large and from 12B to larger LLMs does not guarantee gains, and simple early fusion outperforms the tested late-fusion and cross-attention RAG variants for encoders. Per-value analyses show that context and retrieval help most for socially situated or conceptually confusable values. These findings suggest that value-sensitive NLP should evaluate context, knowledge, and model family jointly rather than treating longer inputs or larger models as universal improvements.

A robot's flash endurance is a non-renewable stock: every persisted write spends one of a few thousand program/erase cycles and never refills, yet no fielded robot memory system prices which memories are worth an erase cycle. We treat embodied memory as depreciating capital and price that stock with a single endurance shadow price η, which makes cost-minimizing placement across a RAM / on-board NVM / cloud hierarchy a threshold in a wear-augmented per-byte index. The index is cost-optimal whatever the sign of the value-write association χ; only when χ> 0 does the optimum turn non-monotone, sending a robot's most valuable memories off its flash. The pivot is thus empirical, and we measure χ on real robot logs at a pre-specified gate: its sign is a property of the deployment regime -- positive on recurrent long-horizon manipulation (hatχ approx +1.0 times 10^{-3}, replicated at full power), null on a shorter-horizon suite, and negative on non-recurrent teleoperation. Two boundaries scope the result. The endurance budget is dormant on premium 3,000-P/E TLC at datasheet prices and binding on the commodity QLC/eMMC (sim1,000 P/E) that cheaper edge robots run. And where it binds, a learned wear-aware controller only ties price-based routing on task value, because realized value is tier-invariant across RAM, NVM, and cloud: the rent governs device lifetime and cost, not task performance. Whether wear-aware placement improves task value remains open -- χ is measured against a value proxy, and the non-monotone optimum, while proven, is not yet observed in data.

We study sentence-level identification of the 19 values in the Schwartz motivational continuum as a concrete formulation of human value detection in text. The setting - out-of-context sentences from news and political manifestos - features sparse moral cues and severe class imbalance. This combination makes fine-grained sentence-level value detection intrinsically difficult, even for strong modern neural models. We first operationalize a binary moral presence task ("does any value appear?") and show that it is learnable from single sentences (positive-class F1 approx 0.74 with calibrated thresholds). We then compare a presence-gated hierarchy to a direct multi-label classifier under matched compute, both based on DeBERTa-base and augmented with lightweight signals (prior-sentence context, LIWC-22/eMFD/MJD lexica, and topic features). The hierarchy does not outperform direct prediction, indicating that gate recall limits downstream gains. We also benchmark instruction-tuned LLMs - Gemma 2 9B, Llama 3.1 8B, Mistral 8B, and Qwen 2.5 7B - in zero-/few-shot and QLoRA setups and build simple ensembles; a soft-vote supervised ensemble reaches macro-F1 0.332, significantly surpassing the best single supervised model and exceeding prior English-only baselines. Overall, in this scenario, lightweight signals and small ensembles yield the most reliable improvements, while hierarchical gating offers limited benefit. We argue that, under an 8 GB single-GPU constraint and at the 7-9B scale, carefully tuned supervised encoders remain a strong and compute-efficient baseline for structured human value detection, and we outline how richer value structure and sentence-in-document context could further improve performance.

Understanding human preferences is crucial for improving foundation models and building personalized AI systems. However, preferences are inherently diverse and complex, making it difficult for traditional reward models to capture their full range. While fine-grained preference data can help, collecting it is expensive and hard to scale. In this paper, we introduce Decomposed Reward Models (DRMs), a novel approach that extracts diverse human preferences from binary comparisons without requiring fine-grained annotations. Our key insight is to represent human preferences as vectors and analyze them using Principal Component Analysis (PCA). By constructing a dataset of embedding differences between preferred and rejected responses, DRMs identify orthogonal basis vectors that capture distinct aspects of preference. These decomposed rewards can be flexibly combined to align with different user needs, offering an interpretable and scalable alternative to traditional reward models. We demonstrate that DRMs effectively extract meaningful preference dimensions (e.g., helpfulness, safety, humor) and adapt to new users without additional training. Our results highlight DRMs as a powerful framework for personalized and interpretable LLM alignment.

The dominant practice of AI alignment assumes (1) that preferences are an adequate representation of human values, (2) that human rationality can be understood in terms of maximizing the satisfaction of preferences, and (3) that AI systems should be aligned with the preferences of one or more humans to ensure that they behave safely and in accordance with our values. Whether implicitly followed or explicitly endorsed, these commitments constitute what we term a preferentist approach to AI alignment. In this paper, we characterize and challenge the preferentist approach, describing conceptual and technical alternatives that are ripe for further research. We first survey the limits of rational choice theory as a descriptive model, explaining how preferences fail to capture the thick semantic content of human values, and how utility representations neglect the possible incommensurability of those values. We then critique the normativity of expected utility theory (EUT) for humans and AI, drawing upon arguments showing how rational agents need not comply with EUT, while highlighting how EUT is silent on which preferences are normatively acceptable. Finally, we argue that these limitations motivate a reframing of the targets of AI alignment: Instead of alignment with the preferences of a human user, developer, or humanity-writ-large, AI systems should be aligned with normative standards appropriate to their social roles, such as the role of a general-purpose assistant. Furthermore, these standards should be negotiated and agreed upon by all relevant stakeholders. On this alternative conception of alignment, a multiplicity of AI systems will be able to serve diverse ends, aligned with normative standards that promote mutual benefit and limit harm despite our plural and divergent values.

In this work, we study the simple yet universally applicable case of reward shaping in value-based Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). We show that reward shifting in the form of the linear transformation is equivalent to changing the initialization of the Q-function in function approximation. Based on such an equivalence, we bring the key insight that a positive reward shifting leads to conservative exploitation, while a negative reward shifting leads to curiosity-driven exploration. Accordingly, conservative exploitation improves offline RL value estimation, and optimistic value estimation improves exploration for online RL. We validate our insight on a range of RL tasks and show its improvement over baselines: (1) In offline RL, the conservative exploitation leads to improved performance based on off-the-shelf algorithms; (2) In online continuous control, multiple value functions with different shifting constants can be used to tackle the exploration-exploitation dilemma for better sample efficiency; (3) In discrete control tasks, a negative reward shifting yields an improvement over the curiosity-based exploration method.

While Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has become the predominant method for controlling language model outputs, it suffers from high computational costs and training instability. Guided decoding, especially value-guided methods, offers a cost-effective alternative by controlling outputs without re-training models. However, the accuracy of the value function is crucial for value-guided decoding, as inaccuracies can lead to suboptimal decision-making and degraded performance. Existing methods struggle with accurately estimating the optimal value function, leading to less effective control. We propose Iterative Value Function Optimization, a novel framework that addresses these limitations through two key components: Monte Carlo Value Estimation, which reduces estimation variance by exploring diverse trajectories, and Iterative On-Policy Optimization, which progressively improves value estimation through collecting trajectories from value-guided policies. Extensive experiments on text summarization, multi-turn dialogue, and instruction following demonstrate the effectiveness of value-guided decoding approaches in aligning language models. These approaches not only achieve alignment but also significantly reduce computational costs by leveraging principled value function optimization for efficient and effective control.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents deployed for real-world tasks face a fundamental dilemma: user requests are underspecified, yet agents must decide whether to act on incomplete information or interrupt users for clarification. Existing approaches either rely on brittle confidence thresholds that require task-specific tuning, or fail to account for the varying stakes of different decisions. We introduce a decision-theoretic framework that resolves this trade-off through the Value of Information (VoI), enabling agents to dynamically weigh the expected utility gain from asking questions against the cognitive cost imposed on users. Our inference-time method requires no hyperparameter tuning and adapts seamlessly across contexts-from casual games to medical diagnosis. Experiments across four diverse domains (20 Questions, medical diagnosis, flight booking, and e-commerce) show that VoI consistently matches or exceeds the best manually-tuned baselines, achieving up to 1.36 utility points higher in high-cost settings. This work provides a parameter-free framework for adaptive agent communication that explicitly balances task risk, query ambiguity, and user effort.

With the wide application of large language models (LLMs) in real-world scenarios, the value implication of their outputs is crucial. However, existing evaluation benchmarks suffer from insufficient coverage of value dilemmas in daily scenarios involving multiple value conflicts and simplistic evaluation formalisms that fail to assess LLMs' value alignment. To address these issues, we propose D2VBench, a value alignment benchmark comprising 10,000 instances of real daily dilemma scenarios constructed through a multi-stage collaboration between LLMs and humans, grounded in 158 manually annotated fine-grained value concepts. For evaluation on the benchmark, we present a hybrid evaluation paradigm that integrates multiple-choice questions with open-ended questions. We conduct comprehensive evaluations on eight mainstream LLMs. Experimental results demonstrate that D2VBench exhibits high reliability and robustness, effectively reflecting the LLMs' alignment across different value categories and dimensions, and providing a more realistic and fine-grained tool for research on value alignment. The dataset is available at https://github.com/tjunlp-lab/D2VBench.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly characterised in recent evaluation work as having stable, model-level preference and value systems. However, accompanying robustness checks are limited to incidental prompt perturbations such as syntax variation and option reordering. This leaves open whether the measured properties survive when the surrounding task context changes, as it does in most real deployments. We test this directly across two established pairwise paradigms: ranking country preferences and eliciting utility judgements. In both, we make the deployment context -- the high-level task the model is performing while making concrete value-dependent choices -- our controlled variable, varied across framings such as writing a Reddit post or a news article. Across five LLMs and over 1.2M pairwise decisions, deployment context produces variation far larger than prompt paraphrasing and temperature controls. In country preference rankings over 15 countries, context induces widespread, statistically significant rank shifts; the aggregate Global North favouritism reported in prior work is itself context-dependent, with each model's bias shifting systematically across contexts. In utility elicitation over 50 outcomes, broad cross-category ordering is preserved, but fine-grained rankings within domains vary substantially, and cardinal exchange rates between outcomes (e.g. how many lives in one region equal one in another) shift by a factor of 2.47 at the median. Reported model-level preferences and utilities are therefore better understood as context-conditioned measurements than fixed model-level properties: safety guarantees obtained under one framing provide limited assurance in another.

We introduce the Deep Value Benchmark (DVB), an evaluation framework that directly tests whether large language models (LLMs) learn fundamental human values or merely surface-level preferences. This distinction is critical for AI alignment: Systems that capture deeper values are likely to generalize human intentions robustly, while those that capture only superficial patterns in preference data risk producing misaligned behavior. The DVB uses a novel experimental design with controlled confounding between deep values (e.g., moral principles) and shallow features (e.g., superficial attributes). In the training phase, we expose LLMs to human preference data with deliberately correlated deep and shallow features -- for instance, where a user consistently prefers (non-maleficence, formal language) options over (justice, informal language) alternatives. The testing phase then breaks these correlations, presenting choices between (justice, formal language) and (non-maleficence, informal language) options. This design allows us to precisely measure a model's Deep Value Generalization Rate (DVGR) -- the probability of generalizing based on the underlying value rather than the shallow feature. Across 9 different models, the average DVGR is just 0.30. All models generalize deep values less than chance. Larger models have a (slightly) lower DVGR than smaller models. We are releasing our dataset, which was subject to three separate human validation experiments. DVB provides an interpretable measure of a core feature of alignment.

The value alignment of large language models (LLMs) is crucial for ensuring responses align with human intention and value preferences. However, most evaluations of value alignment focus on Western or universal values, while assessments grounded in the value systems of specific countries remain scarce. In this paper, we introduce Pancasila-Dilemmas, an evaluation dataset of 1,834 questions derived from Indonesian news, classified by 5 values of Pancasila: Religion, Humanity, Unity, Democracy, and Social Justice. This dataset reflects daily life in Indonesia, making it suitable for measuring the value alignment of LLMs deployed for Indonesia. To ensure a more rigorous evaluation, we choose scenarios containing dilemmas. The dataset is proofread by native speakers and answered by 5 diverse Indonesian citizens. We evaluate 50 closed- and open-source LLMs on our dataset. Results reveal that all evaluated LLMs achieves less than 0.5 Probability Match Score (PMS) and 0.72 Max-Vote Agreement Score (MVAS). Compared by each values, LLMs mostly struggle in Religion and Unity dilemma cases. This highlights a significant gap in capturing Indonesian values. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/tjunlp-lab/Pancasila-Dilemmas.

Slot Attention (SA) with pretrained diffusion models has recently shown promise for object-centric learning (OCL), but suffers from slot entanglement and weak alignment between object slots and image content. We propose Contrastive Object-centric Diffusion Alignment (CODA), a simple extension that (i) employs register slots to absorb residual attention and reduce interference between object slots, and (ii) applies a contrastive alignment loss to explicitly encourage slot-image correspondence. The resulting training objective serves as a tractable surrogate for maximizing mutual information (MI) between slots and inputs, strengthening slot representation quality. On both synthetic (MOVi-C/E) and real-world datasets (VOC, COCO), CODA improves object discovery (e.g., +6.1% FG-ARI on COCO), property prediction, and compositional image generation over strong baselines. Register slots add negligible overhead, keeping CODA efficient and scalable. These results indicate potential applications of CODA as an effective framework for robust OCL in complex, real-world scenes.

Agentic AI architectures augment LLMs with external tools, unlocking strong capabilities but potentially incurring substantial costs. Moreover, tool use is not always beneficial: redundant or low-utility calls can even harm task performance. Effective tool use, therefore, hinges on a core LLM decision: whether to call or not call a tool when performing a task. We introduce a principled framework inspired by decision-making theory to understand tool-use decisions along three key factors: necessity, utility, and affordability. Our analysis combines two complementary lenses: a normative perspective that infers true need and utility for optimal tool calls, and a descriptive perspective that infers the model's self-perceived need and utility from their observed behaviors. We evaluate six open models and a proprietary OpenAI model across native and customized harnesses, two tools, and six tasks. Models' perceived need and utility remain misaligned with their true values, particularly under budget constraints. This misalignment produces both costly overuse and performance-degrading calls. To improve the tool decisions, we train lightweight latent estimators of need (LNEs) from model hidden states. LNEs generally predict true need more accurately than model self-reports and improve budgeted tool allocation across model scales and tool types. Code and dataset available at https://github.com/QinyuanWu0710/ToCall_or_NotToCall.

Many modern retrieval problems are set-valued: given a broad intent, the system must return a collection of results that optimizes higher-order properties (e.g., diversity, coverage, complementarity, coherence) while remaining grounded with respect to a fixed database. Set-valued objectives are typically non-decomposable and are not captured by existing supervised (query, content) datasets which only prioritize top-1 retrieval. Consequently, fan-out retrieval is often employed to generate diverse subqueries to retrieve item sets. While reinforcement learning (RL) can optimize set-level objectives via interaction, deploying an RL-tuned LLM for fan-out retrieval is prohibitively expensive at inference time. Conversely, diffusion-based generative retrieval enables efficient single-pass fan-out in embedding space, but requires objective-aligned training targets. To address these issues, we propose R4T (Retrieve-for-Train), which uses RL once as an objective transducer in a three-step process: (i) train a fan-out LLM with composite set-level rewards, (ii) synthesize objective-consistent training pairs, and (iii) train a lightweight diffusion retriever to model the conditional distribution of set-valued outputs. Across large-scale fashion and music benchmarks consisting of curated item sets, we show that R4T improves retrieval quality relative to strong baselines while reducing query-time fan-out latency by an order of magnitude.

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is essential for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values. However, RLHF is susceptible to reward hacking, where the agent exploits flaws in the reward function rather than learning the intended behavior, thus degrading alignment. While reward shaping helps stabilize RLHF and partially mitigate reward hacking, a systematic investigation into shaping techniques and their underlying principles remains lacking. To bridge this gap, we present a comprehensive study of the prevalent reward shaping methods. Our analysis suggests three key design principles: (1) RL reward is ideally bounded, (2) RL benefits from rapid initial growth followed by gradual convergence, and (3) RL reward is best formulated as a function of centered reward. Guided by these insights, we propose Preference As Reward (PAR), a novel approach that leverages the latent preferences embedded within the reward model itself as the signal for reinforcement learning. We evaluated PAR on two base models, Gemma2-2B and Llama3-8B, using two datasets, Ultrafeedback-Binarized and HH-RLHF. Experimental results demonstrate PAR's superior performance over other reward shaping methods. On the AlpacaEval 2.0 benchmark, PAR achieves a win rate at least 5 percentage points higher than competing approaches. Furthermore, PAR exhibits remarkable data efficiency, requiring only a single reference reward for optimal performance, and maintains robustness against reward hacking even after two full epochs of training. Code is available at https://github.com/PorUna-byte/PAR.

A common approach for aligning language models to human preferences is to first learn a reward model from preference data, and then use this reward model to update the language model. We study two closely related problems that arise in this approach. First, any monotone transformation of the reward model preserves preference ranking; is there a choice that is ``better'' than others? Second, we often wish to align language models to multiple properties: how should we combine multiple reward models? Using a probabilistic interpretation of the alignment procedure, we identify a natural choice for transformation for (the common case of) rewards learned from Bradley-Terry preference models. This derived transformation has two important properties. First, it emphasizes improving poorly-performing outputs, rather than outputs that already score well. This mitigates both underfitting (where some prompts are not improved) and reward hacking (where the model learns to exploit misspecification of the reward model). Second, it enables principled aggregation of rewards by linking summation to logical conjunction: the sum of transformed rewards corresponds to the probability that the output is ``good'' in all measured properties, in a sense we make precise. Experiments aligning language models to be both helpful and harmless using RLHF show substantial improvements over the baseline (non-transformed) approach.

Modeling human preferences is crucial for aligning foundation models with human values. Traditional reward modeling methods, such as the Bradley-Terry (BT) reward model, fall short in expressiveness, particularly in addressing intransitive preferences. Although supervised pair preference models (PairPM) can express general preferences, their implementation is highly ad-hoc and cannot guarantee a consistent preference probability of compared pairs. Additionally, they impose high computational costs due to their quadratic query complexity when comparing multiple responses. In this paper, we introduce preference representation learning, an approach that embeds responses into a latent space to capture intricate preference structures efficiently, achieving linear query complexity. Additionally, we propose preference score-based General Preference Optimization (GPO), which generalizes reward-based reinforcement learning from human feedback. Experimental results show that our General Preference representation model (GPM) outperforms the BT reward model on the RewardBench benchmark with a margin of up to 5.6% and effectively models cyclic preferences where any BT reward model behaves like a random guess. Furthermore, evaluations on downstream tasks such as AlpacaEval2.0 and MT-Bench, following the language model post-training with GPO and our general preference model, reveal substantial performance improvements with margins up to 9.3%. These findings indicate that our method may enhance the alignment of foundation models with nuanced human values. The code is available at https://github.com/general-preference/general-preference-model.

It is typically understood that the training of modern neural networks is a process of fitting the probability distribution of desired output. However, recent paradoxical observations in a number of language generation tasks let one wonder if this canonical probability-based explanation can really account for the empirical success of deep learning. To resolve this issue, we propose an alternative utility-based explanation to the standard supervised learning procedure in deep learning. The basic idea is to interpret the learned neural network not as a probability model but as an ordinal utility function that encodes the preference revealed in training data. In this perspective, training of the neural network corresponds to a utility learning process. Specifically, we show that for all neural networks with softmax outputs, the SGD learning dynamic of maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) can be seen as an iteration process that optimizes the neural network toward an optimal utility function. This utility-based interpretation can explain several otherwise-paradoxical observations about the neural networks thus trained. Moreover, our utility-based theory also entails an equation that can transform the learned utility values back to a new kind of probability estimation with which probability-compatible decision rules enjoy dramatic (double-digits) performance improvements. These evidences collectively reveal a phenomenon of utility-probability duality in terms of what modern neural networks are (truly) modeling: We thought they are one thing (probabilities), until the unexplainable showed up; changing mindset and treating them as another thing (utility values) largely reconcile the theory, despite remaining subtleties regarding its original (probabilistic) identity.

Diffusion models have emerged as powerful generative tools across various domains, yet tailoring pre-trained models to exhibit specific desirable properties remains challenging. While reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising solution,current methods struggle to simultaneously achieve stable, efficient fine-tuning and support non-differentiable rewards. Furthermore, their reliance on sparse rewards provides inadequate supervision during intermediate steps, often resulting in suboptimal generation quality. To address these limitations, dense and differentiable signals are required throughout the diffusion process. Hence, we propose VAlue-based Reinforced Diffusion (VARD): a novel approach that first learns a value function predicting expection of rewards from intermediate states, and subsequently uses this value function with KL regularization to provide dense supervision throughout the generation process. Our method maintains proximity to the pretrained model while enabling effective and stable training via backpropagation. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach facilitates better trajectory guidance, improves training efficiency and extends the applicability of RL to diffusion models optimized for complex, non-differentiable reward functions.

Program synthesis aims to create accurate, executable code from natural language descriptions. This field has leveraged the power of reinforcement learning (RL) in conjunction with large language models (LLMs), significantly enhancing code generation capabilities. This integration focuses on directly optimizing functional correctness, transcending conventional supervised losses. While current literature predominantly favors policy-based algorithms, attributes of program synthesis suggest a natural compatibility with value-based methods. This stems from rich collection of off-policy programs developed by human programmers, and the straightforward verification of generated programs through automated unit testing (i.e. easily obtainable rewards in RL language). Diverging from the predominant use of policy-based algorithms, our work explores the applicability of value-based approaches, leading to the development of our B-Coder (pronounced Bellman coder). Yet, training value-based methods presents challenges due to the enormous search space inherent to program synthesis. To this end, we propose an initialization protocol for RL agents utilizing pre-trained LMs and a conservative Bellman operator to reduce training complexities. Moreover, we demonstrate how to leverage the learned value functions as a dual strategy to post-process generated programs. Our empirical evaluations demonstrated B-Coder's capability in achieving state-of-the-art performance compared with policy-based methods. Remarkably, this achievement is reached with minimal reward engineering effort, highlighting the effectiveness of value-based RL, independent of reward designs.

Agentic commerce is moving from concept to deployed infrastructure: payment networks, retailers, and AI platforms are setting the stage for agents to transact on behalf of merchants and consumers. Yet whether the LLMs behind these agents can price competently in real markets, where customer preferences are hidden, competitors adapt in real time, and demand can shift without warning, has not been systematically tested. We introduce Bazaar, a dynamic sealed-bid benchmark for multi-attribute auction under these conditions. Despite its dynamics, the benchmark is grounded in closed-form customer utilities, enabling exact evaluation. Across 11 frontier LLMs from four providers, the leading agents on customer acquisition (e.g. Gemini 3.1 Pro) are often not the leading agents on profit (e.g. Opus 4.6). The ranking shifts again under demand shocks: agents that learned fastest pre-shock are typically the slowest to revise their beliefs afterwards, while Gemini 3.1 Pro recovers fastest despite not leading on profit. However, even the strongest agent captures less than a third of hindsight-optimal profit, suggesting current LLMs are progressing in agentic commerce but leave substantial headroom.

Conventional models of matching markets assume that monetary transfers can clear markets by compensating for utility differentials. However, empirical patterns show that such transfers often fail to close structural preference gaps. This paper introduces a market microstructure framework that models matching decisions as a limit order book system with rigid bid ask spreads. Individual preferences are represented by a latent preference state matrix, where the spread between an agent's internal ask price (the unconditional maximum) and the market's best bid (the reachable maximum) creates a structural liquidity constraint. We establish a Threshold Impossibility Theorem showing that linear compensation cannot close these spreads unless it induces a categorical identity shift. A dynamic discrete choice execution model further demonstrates that matches occur only when the market to book ratio crosses a time decaying liquidity threshold, analogous to order execution under inventory pressure. Numerical experiments validate persistent slippage, regional invariance of preference orderings, and high tier zero spread executions. The model provides a unified microstructure explanation for matching failures, compensation inefficiency, and post match regret in illiquid order driven environments.

Generative recommendation via autoregressive models has unified retrieval and ranking into a single conditional generation framework. However, fine-tuning these models with Reinforcement Learning (RL) often suffers from a fundamental probability-reward mismatch. Conventional likelihood-dominated decoding (e.g., beam search) exhibits a myopic bias toward locally probable prefixes, which causes two critical failures: (1) insufficient exploration, where high-reward items in low-probability branches are prematurely pruned and rarely sampled, and (2) advantage compression, where trajectories sharing high-probability prefixes receive highly correlated rewards with low within-group variance, yielding a weak comparative signal for RL. To address these challenges, we propose V-STAR, a Value-guided Sampling and Tree-structured Advantage Reinforcement framework. V-STAR forms a self-evolving loop via two synergistic components. First, a Value-Guided Efficient Decoding (VED) is developed to identify decisive nodes and selectively deepen high-potential prefixes. This improves exploration efficiency without exhaustive tree search. Second, we propose Sibling-GRPO, which exploits the induced tree topology to compute sibling-relative advantages and concentrates learning signals on decisive branching decisions. Extensive experiments on both offline and online datasets demonstrate that V-STAR outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, delivering superior accuracy and candidate-set diversity under strict latency constraints.

In machine learning, the notion of multi-armed bandits refers to a class of online learning problems, in which an agent is supposed to simultaneously explore and exploit a given set of choice alternatives in the course of a sequential decision process. In the standard setting, the agent learns from stochastic feedback in the form of real-valued rewards. In many applications, however, numerical reward signals are not readily available -- instead, only weaker information is provided, in particular relative preferences in the form of qualitative comparisons between pairs of alternatives. This observation has motivated the study of variants of the multi-armed bandit problem, in which more general representations are used both for the type of feedback to learn from and the target of prediction. The aim of this paper is to provide a survey of the state of the art in this field, referred to as preference-based multi-armed bandits or dueling bandits. To this end, we provide an overview of problems that have been considered in the literature as well as methods for tackling them. Our taxonomy is mainly based on the assumptions made by these methods about the data-generating process and, related to this, the properties of the preference-based feedback.

In this report, we introduce a collection of methods to enhance reward modeling for LLMs, focusing specifically on data-centric techniques. We propose effective data selection and filtering strategies for curating high-quality open-source preference datasets, culminating in the Skywork-Reward data collection, which contains only 80K preference pairs -- significantly smaller than existing datasets. Using this curated dataset, we developed the Skywork-Reward model series -- Skywork-Reward-Gemma-27B and Skywork-Reward-Llama-3.1-8B -- with the former currently holding the top position on the RewardBench leaderboard. Notably, our techniques and datasets have directly enhanced the performance of many top-ranked models on RewardBench, highlighting the practical impact of our contributions in real-world preference learning applications.

Despite the significant progress made by existing retrieval augmented language models (RALMs) in providing trustworthy responses and grounding in reliable sources, they often overlook effective alignment with human preferences. In the alignment process, reward models (RMs) act as a crucial proxy for human values to guide optimization. However, it remains unclear how to evaluate and select a reliable RM for preference alignment in RALMs. To this end, we propose RAG-RewardBench, the first benchmark for evaluating RMs in RAG settings. First, we design four crucial and challenging RAG-specific scenarios to assess RMs, including multi-hop reasoning, fine-grained citation, appropriate abstain, and conflict robustness. Then, we incorporate 18 RAG subsets, six retrievers, and 24 RALMs to increase the diversity of data sources. Finally, we adopt an LLM-as-a-judge approach to improve preference annotation efficiency and effectiveness, exhibiting a strong correlation with human annotations. Based on the RAG-RewardBench, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of 45 RMs and uncover their limitations in RAG scenarios. Additionally, we also reveal that existing trained RALMs show almost no improvement in preference alignment, highlighting the need for a shift towards preference-aligned training.We release our benchmark and code publicly at https://huggingface.co/datasets/jinzhuoran/RAG-RewardBench/ for future work.

Polymarket is a prediction market platform where users can speculate on future events by trading shares tied to specific outcomes, known as conditions. Each market is associated with a set of one or more such conditions. To ensure proper market resolution, the condition set must be exhaustive -- collectively accounting for all possible outcomes -- and mutually exclusive -- only one condition may resolve as true. Thus, the collective prices of all related outcomes should be \1, representing a combined probability of 1 of any outcome. Despite this design, Polymarket exhibits cases where dependent assets are mispriced, allowing for purchasing (or selling) a certain outcome for less than (or more than) 1, guaranteeing profit. This phenomenon, known as arbitrage, could enable sophisticated participants to exploit such inconsistencies. In this paper, we conduct an empirical arbitrage analysis on Polymarket data to answer three key questions: (Q1) What conditions give rise to arbitrage (Q2) Does arbitrage actually occur on Polymarket and (Q3) Has anyone exploited these opportunities. A major challenge in analyzing arbitrage between related markets lies in the scalability of comparisons across a large number of markets and conditions, with a naive analysis requiring O(2^{n+m}) comparisons. To overcome this, we employ a heuristic-driven reduction strategy based on timeliness, topical similarity, and combinatorial relationships, further validated by expert input. Our study reveals two distinct forms of arbitrage on Polymarket: Market Rebalancing Arbitrage, which occurs within a single market or condition, and Combinatorial Arbitrage, which spans across multiple markets. We use on-chain historical order book data to analyze when these types of arbitrage opportunities have existed, and when they have been executed by users. We find a realized estimate of 40 million USD of profit extracted.

We study the discrete Bertrand pricing game with a non-increasing demand function. The game has n ge 2 players who simultaneously choose prices from the set {1/k, 2/k, ldots, 1}, where kinN. The player who sets the lowest price captures the entire demand; if multiple players tie for the lowest price, they split the demand equally. We study the Bertrand paradox, where classical theory predicts low prices, yet real markets often sustain high prices. To understand this gap, we analyze a repeated-game model in which firms set prices using no-regret learners. Our goal is to characterize the equilibrium outcomes that can arise under different no-regret learning guarantees. We are particularly interested in questions such as whether no-external-regret learners can converge to undesirable high-price outcomes, and how stronger guarantees such as no-swap regret shape the emergence of competitive low-price behavior. We address these and related questions through a theoretical analysis, complemented by experiments that support the theory and reveal surprising phenomena for no-swap regret learners.

In-context learning enables large language models (LLMs) to perform a variety of tasks, including learning to make reward-maximizing choices in simple bandit tasks. Given their potential use as (autonomous) decision-making agents, it is important to understand how these models perform such reinforcement learning (RL) tasks and the extent to which they are susceptible to biases. Motivated by the fact that, in humans, it has been widely documented that the value of an outcome depends on how it compares to other local outcomes, the present study focuses on whether similar value encoding biases apply to how LLMs encode rewarding outcomes. Results from experiments with multiple bandit tasks and models show that LLMs exhibit behavioral signatures of a relative value bias. Adding explicit outcome comparisons to the prompt produces opposing effects on performance, enhancing maximization in trained choice sets but impairing generalization to new choice sets. Computational cognitive modeling reveals that LLM behavior is well-described by a simple RL algorithm that incorporates relative values at the outcome encoding stage. Lastly, we present preliminary evidence that the observed biases are not limited to fine-tuned LLMs, and that relative value processing is detectable in the final hidden layer activations of a raw, pretrained model. These findings have important implications for the use of LLMs in decision-making applications.

In pursuit of participatory budgeting (PB) outcomes with broader fairness guarantees, we initiate the study of lotteries over discrete PB outcomes. As the projects have heterogeneous costs, the amount spent may not be equal ex ante and ex post. To address this, we develop a technique to bound the amount by which the ex-post spend differs from the ex-ante spend -- the property is termed budget balanced up to one project (BB1). With respect to fairness, we take a best-of-both-worlds perspective, seeking outcomes that are both ex-ante and ex-post fair. Towards this goal, we initiate a study of ex-ante fairness properties in PB, including Individual Fair Share (IFS), Unanimous Fair Share (UFS) and their stronger variants, as well as Group Fair Share (GFS). We show several incompatibility results between these ex-ante fairness notions and existing ex-post concepts based on justified representation. One of our main contributions is a randomized algorithm which simultaneously satisfies ex-ante Strong UFS, ex-post full justified representation (FJR) and ex-post BB1 for PB with binary utilities.