mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Translate Policy to Language: Flow Matching Generated Rewards for LLM Explanations

arXiv 2502.12530 ↗First posted 18 Feb 2025cs.CL cs.LGcited by 6

On the map: LLM alignment / RLHF / preference optimisation → Reward modeling and RLHF

Abstract (arXiv)

As humans increasingly share environments with diverse agents powered by RL, LLMs, and beyond, the ability to explain agent policies in natural language is vital for reliable coexistence. We introduce a general-purpose framework that trains explanation-generating LLMs via reinforcement learning from AI feedback, with distributional rewards generated by generative continuous normalizing flows (CNFs). CNFs capture the pluralistic and probabilistic nature of human judgments about explanations. Moreover, under mild assumptions, CNFs provably bound deviations from true human reward distributions when trained on noisy proxy rewards from LLMs. We design a specialized CNF architecture that selectively attends to linguistic cues in the decision context and explanations when generating rewards. Human and LLM evaluators find that our method delivers explanations that enable more accurate predictions of true agent decisions, exhibit greater logical soundness and actionability, and impose lower cognitive load than explanations trained with proxy LLM rewards or state-of-the-art RLHF and RLAIF baselines.

Key facts. Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Reward modeling and RLHF, one of 10 directions in LLM alignment / RLHF / preference optimisation. Builds on 97 of its 127 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 18 Feb 2025.

Builds on

97 of 127 references.

Closest ancestors · 8

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2024Skywork-Reward: Bag of Tricks for Reward Modeling in LLMs24 Oct
  2. 2024Uncertainty-aware Reward Model: Teaching Reward Models to Know What is Unknown1 Oct
  3. 2024Quantile Regression for Distributional Reward Models in RLHF16 Sep
  4. 2024Regularizing Hidden States Enables Learning Generalizable Reward Model for LLMs14 Jun
  5. 2024RLHF Workflow: From Reward Modeling to Online RLHF13 May
  6. 2024RewardBench: Evaluating Reward Models for Language Modeling20 Mar
  7. 2023Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model29 May
  8. 2022Training a Helpful and Harmless Assistant with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback12 Apr

Other references · 89

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50 most cited of 89 All 89 (JSON)

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 4; 2026: 2.

6 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

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  6. 2023Understanding Your Agent: Leveraging Large Language Models for Behavior Explanation
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