Papers › A Comprehensive Survey of Reward Models: Taxonomy, Applications, Challenges, and Future

A Comprehensive Survey of Reward Models: Taxonomy, Applications, Challenges, and Future

12 Apr 2025arXiv:2504.12328archive 2025-07-28

Jialun Zhong, Wei Shen, Yanzeng Li, Songyang Gao, Hua Lu, Yicheng Chen, Yang Zhang, Wei Zhou, Jinjie Gu, Lei Zou

Reward Model (RM) has demonstrated impressive potential for enhancing Large Language Models (LLM), as RM can serve as a proxy for human preferences, providing signals to guide LLMs' behavior in various tasks. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive overview of relevant research, exploring RMs from the perspectives of preference collection, reward modeling, and usage. Next, we introduce the applications of RMs and discuss the benchmarks for evaluation. Furthermore, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the challenges existing in the field and dive into the potential research directions. This paper is dedicated to providing beginners with a comprehensive introduction to RMs and facilitating future studies. The resources are publicly available at github\footnote{https://github.com/JLZhong23/awesome-reward-models}.

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