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 human supervision


Quantifying and Auditing LLM Evaluation via Positive--Unlabeled Learning

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as judges for scalable evaluation, yet such LLM--as--a--Judge systems exhibit systematic biases that are decoupled from semantic quality, most notably verbosity bias. Meanwhile, human supervision is costly and typically selective, yielding reliable positive judgments but leaving most outputs unlabelled and potentially mixed in quality. We formulate LLM evaluation under selective human supervision as a positive--unlabelled learning problem and propose a geometric auditing framework based on Partial Optimal Transport. By aligning a small set of human--verified positives with a reliable subset of unlabelled outputs in a fixed embedding space, our method identifies human--consistent preferences and corrects biased judges without retraining. Experiments demonstrate improved alignment with human preferences, increased robustness to presentation biases, and interpretable confidence estimates, offering a scalable and statistically grounded alternative to existing LLM--as--a--judge pipelines.


Easy-to-Hard Generalization: Scalable Alignment Beyond Human Supervision

Neural Information Processing Systems

Current AI alignment methodologies rely on human-provided demonstrations or judgments, and the learned capabilities of AI systems would be upper-bounded by human capabilities as a result. This raises a challenging research question: How can we keep improving the systems when their capabilities have surpassed the levels of humans?


Teachable Reinforcement Learning via Advice Distillation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Training automated agents to complete complex tasks in interactive environments is challenging: reinforcement learning requires careful hand-engineering of reward functions, imitation learning requires specialized infrastructure and access to a human expert, and learning from intermediate forms of supervision (like binary preferences) is time-consuming and extracts little information from each human intervention. Can we overcome these challenges by building agents that learn from rich, interactive feedback instead? We propose a new supervision paradigm for interactive learning based on teachable decision-making systems that learn from structured advice provided by an external teacher. We begin by formalizing a class of human-in-the-loop decision making problems in which multiple forms of teacher-provided advice are available to a learner. We then describe a simple learning algorithm for these problems that first learns to interpret advice, then learns from advice to complete tasks even in the absence of human supervision. In puzzle-solving, navigation, and locomotion domains, we show that agents that learn from advice can acquire new skills with significantly less human supervision than standard reinforcement learning algorithms and often less than imitation learning.


Scalable Oversight via Partitioned Human Supervision

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

As artificial intelligence (AI) systems approach and surpass expert human performance across a broad range of tasks, obtaining high-quality human supervision for evaluation and training becomes increasingly challenging. Our focus is on tasks that require deep knowledge and skills of multiple domains. Unfortunately, even the best human experts are knowledgeable only in a single narrow area, and will not be able to evaluate the correctness of advanced AI systems on such superhuman tasks. However, based on their narrow expertise, humans may provide a weak signal, i.e., a complementary label indicating an option that is incorrect. For example, a cardiologist could state that "this is not related to cardiology,'' even if they cannot identify the true disease. Based on this weak signal, we propose a scalable oversight framework that enables us to evaluate frontier AI systems without the need to prepare the ground truth. We derive an unbiased estimator of top-1 accuracy from complementary labels and quantify how many complementary labels are needed to match the variance of ordinary labels. We further introduce two estimators to combine scarce ordinary labels with abundant complementary labels. We provide finite-sample deviation guarantees for both complementary-only and the mixed estimators. Empirically, we show that we can evaluate the output of large language models without the ground truth, if we have complementary labels. We further show that we can train an AI system with such weak signals: we show how we can design an agentic AI system automatically that can perform better with this partitioned human supervision. Our code is available at https://github.com/R-Yin-217/Scalable-Oversight-via-Human-Partitioned-Supervision.


Reversing the Paradigm: Building AI-First Systems with Human Guidance

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The relationship between humans and artificial intelligence is no longer science fiction -- it's a growing reality reshaping how we live and work. AI has moved beyond research labs into everyday life, powering customer service chats, personalizing travel, aiding doctors in diagnosis, and supporting educators. What makes this moment particularly compelling is AI's increasing collaborative nature. Rather than replacing humans, AI augments our capabilities -- automating routine tasks, enhancing decisions with data, and enabling creativity in fields like design, music, and writing. The future of work is shifting toward AI agents handling tasks autonomously, with humans as supervisors, strategists, and ethical stewards. This flips the traditional model: instead of humans using AI as a tool, intelligent agents will operate independently within constraints, managing everything from scheduling and customer service to complex workflows. Humans will guide and fine-tune these agents to ensure alignment with goals, values, and context. This shift offers major benefits -- greater efficiency, faster decisions, cost savings, and scalability. But it also brings risks: diminished human oversight, algorithmic bias, security flaws, and a widening skills gap. To navigate this transition, organizations must rethink roles, invest in upskilling, embed ethical principles, and promote transparency. This paper examines the technological and organizational changes needed to enable responsible adoption of AI-first systems -- where autonomy is balanced with human intent, oversight, and values.


Easy-to-Hard Generalization: Scalable Alignment Beyond Human Supervision

Neural Information Processing Systems

Current AI alignment methodologies rely on human-provided demonstrations or judgments, and the learned capabilities of AI systems would be upper-bounded by human capabilities as a result. This raises a challenging research question: How can we keep improving the systems when their capabilities have surpassed the levels of humans? Our key insight is that an evaluator (reward model) trained on supervisions for easier tasks can be effectively used for scoring candidate solutions of harder tasks and hence facilitating easy-to-hard generalization over different levels of tasks. Based on this insight, we propose a novel approach to scalable alignment, which firstly trains the (process-supervised) reward models on easy problems (e.g., level 1-3), and then uses them to evaluate the performance of policy models on hard problems. We show that such easy-to-hard generalization from evaluators can enable easy-to-hard generalizations in generators either through re-ranking or reinforcement learning (RL).


Robust Visual Servoing under Human Supervision for Assembly Tasks

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We propose a framework enabling mobile manipulators to reliably complete pick-and-place tasks for assembling structures from construction blocks. The picking uses an eye-in-hand visual servoing controller for object tracking with Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) to ensure fiducial markers in the blocks remain visible. An additional robot with an eye-to-hand setup ensures precise placement, critical for structural stability. We integrate human-in-the-loop capabilities for flexibility and fault correction and analyze robustness to camera pose errors, proposing adapted barrier functions to handle them. Lastly, experiments validate the framework on 6-DoF mobile arms.


Review for NeurIPS paper: Weakly-Supervised Reinforcement Learning for Controllable Behavior

Neural Information Processing Systems

Summary and Contributions: This paper proposes a framework for goal-conditioned RL with a goal representation whose structure is learned from weak human supervision. Most goal-conditioned RL methods either use the raw image as a goal, or an encoding learned with an unsupervised method such as a VAE. This paper takes as input a (relatively small) dataset of images, and asks human annotators to rank semantic attributes for pairs of image (which has higher lighting, which one has a door which is more open, etc). The algorithm operates in two phases: 1. Using the weak supervision signal from the human annotators, a disentangled representation is learning using a GAN-type loss on triplets of 2 images and one binary label.


Debate Helps Weak-to-Strong Generalization

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Common methods for aligning already-capable models with desired behavior rely on the ability of humans to provide supervision. However, future superhuman models will surpass the capability of humans. Therefore, humans will only be able to weakly supervise superhuman models. This expected deficiency of human evaluation would weaken the safety of future AI systems. Scalable oversight and weak-to-strong generalization are two complementary approaches to tackle this issue. In this paper, we attempt to combine the strengths of these two approaches to further improve alignment. Specifically, we investigate ways of improving human supervision with a strong pretrained model and then supervise the strong model with enhanced weak human supervision. To make iterative empirical progress, we consider an analogy: can we use a strong model to improve weak model supervision and then use it to supervise the strong model? We empirically test it by finetuning a small weak model on ground truth labels with the additional help from a large strong model, and then finetuning the strong model on labels generated by the weak model. We find that debate can assist a weak model in extracting trustworthy information from an untrustworthy strong model, which provides leverage as context on samples when training a weak model. We also show that an ensemble of weak models helps exploit long arguments generated by strong model debaters and obtain a more robust supervision estimate. Extensive experiments on the OpenAI weak-to-strong NLP benchmarks show that the combination approach leads to better alignment, which indicates that debate has the potential to help weak-to-strong generalization.


On Corrigibility and Alignment in Multi Agent Games

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Corrigibility of autonomous agents is an under explored part of system design, with previous work focusing on single agent systems. It has been suggested that uncertainty over the human preferences acts to keep the agents corrigible, even in the face of human irrationality. We present a general framework for modelling corrigibility in a multi-agent setting as a 2 player game in which the agents always have a move in which they can ask the human for supervision. This is formulated as a Bayesian game for the purpose of introducing uncertainty over the human beliefs. We further analyse two specific cases. First, a two player corrigibility game, in which we want corrigibility displayed in both agents for both common payoff (monotone) games and harmonic games. Then we investigate an adversary setting, in which one agent is considered to be a `defending' agent and the other an `adversary'. A general result is provided for what belief over the games and human rationality the defending agent is required to have to induce corrigibility.