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Jiayi Zhou

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7 papers
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7

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Generative RLHF-V: Learning Principles from Multi-modal Human Preference

  • Jiayi Zhou
  • Jiaming Ji
  • Boyuan Chen
  • Jiapeng Sun
  • wenqi chen
  • Donghai Hong
  • Sirui Han
  • Yike Guo

Training multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) that align with human intentions is a long-term challenge. Traditional score-only reward models for alignment suffer from low accuracy, weak generalization, and poor interpretability, blocking the progress of alignment methods, \textit{e. g. ,} reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Generative reward models (GRMs) leverage MLLMs' intrinsic reasoning capabilities to discriminate pair-wise responses, but their pair-wise paradigm makes it hard to generalize to learnable rewards. We introduce Generative RLHF-V, a novel alignment framework that integrates GRMs with multi-modal RLHF. We propose a two-stage pipeline: \textbf{multi-modal generative reward modeling from RL}, where RL guides GRMs to actively capture human intention, then predict the correct pair-wise scores; and \textbf{RL optimization from grouped comparison}, which enhances multi-modal RL scoring precision by grouped responses comparison. Experimental results demonstrate that, besides out-of-distribution generalization of RM discrimination, our framework improves 4 MLLMs' performance across 7 benchmarks by 18. 1\%, while the baseline RLHF is only 5. 3\%. We further validate that Generative RLHF-V achieves a near-linear improvement with an increasing number of candidate responses.

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

InterMT: Multi-Turn Interleaved Preference Alignment with Human Feedback

  • Boyuan Chen
  • Donghai Hong
  • Jiaming Ji
  • Jiacheng Zheng
  • Bowen Dong
  • Jiayi Zhou
  • Kaile Wang
  • Juntao Dai

As multimodal large models (MLLMs) continue to advance across challenging tasks, a key question emerges: \textbf{\textit{What essential capabilities are still missing? }}A critical aspect of human learning is continuous interaction with the environment -- not limited to language, but also involving multimodal understanding and generation. To move closer to human-level intelligence, models must similarly support \textbf{multi-turn}, \textbf{multimodal interaction}. In particular, they should comprehend interleaved multimodal contexts and respond coherently in ongoing exchanges. In this work, we present \textbf{an initial exploration} through the \textsc{InterMT} -- \textbf{the first preference dataset for \textit{multi-turn} multimodal interaction}, grounded in real human feedback. In this exploration, we particularly emphasize the importance of human oversight, introducing expert annotations to guide the process, motivated by the fact that current MLLMs lack such complex interactive capabilities. \textsc{InterMT} captures human preferences at both global and local levels into nine sub-dimensions, consists of 15. 6k prompts, 52. 6k multi-turn dialogue instances, and 32. 4k human-labeled preference pairs. To compensate for the lack of capability for multi-modal understanding and generation, we introduce an agentic workflow that leverages tool-augmented MLLMs to construct multi-turn QA instances. To further this goal, we introduce \textsc{InterMT-Bench} to assess the ability ofMLLMs in assisting judges with multi-turn, multimodal tasks. We demonstrate the utility of \textsc{InterMT} through applications such as judge moderation and further reveal the \textit{multi-turn scaling law} of judge model. We hope the open-source of our data can help facilitate further research on aligning current MLLMs to the next step.

YNIMG Journal 2025 Journal Article

Olfactory sensation emotion regulation: The implicit emotion regulation function of positive olfactory stimuli during emotional picture processing

  • Jiaotao Cai
  • Xinran Wang
  • Jiayi Zhou
  • Ye di
  • Ziruo Shen
  • Shuo An
  • Bingyang Long
  • Yicheng Wang

Previous research has shown that olfactory stimuli can induce emotional states, physiological and neural responses related to emotions. It remains unclear whether positive olfactory stimuli could down-regulate individuals' negative emotions or up-regulate individuals' positive emotions in an unconscious way. The present study investigated the effects of emotional olfactory stimuli on the behavioral and electrophysiological responses to emotional pictures. Forty participants were exposed to different types of odor conditions (neutral, pleasant, unpleasant) and evaluated the emotional pictures' valence and arousal while electroencephalography was recorded. Behavioral results showed that participants reported more positive emotions in response to positive pictures in two types of pleasant odor conditions (especially the citrus) than in unpleasant or neutral odor conditions. However, the pleasant odor (lavender) increased the positive pictures' valence scores but decreased the positive pictures' arousal scores. The ERPs results showed that the pleasant odors reduced the amplitudes of N1 and EPN components in response to negative pictures, indicating that pleasant odors might down-regulate negative emotions through decreasing attentional capture for negative visual stimuli during the early stage. The pleasant odor (lavender) attenuated LPP amplitudes for emotional pictures, suggesting that the positive olfactory stimuli might be helpful to down-regulate the emotional arousal by reducing attentional deployment to negative visual stimuli during the late stage of emotional visual stimuli processing. These findings provided novel behavioral and neurophysiological evidence that positive olfactory stimuli modulated visual emotional processing across multiple stages, and suggested that olfactory sensation could function as a rapid and relatively effortless emotion regulation modality.

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Safe RLHF-V: Safe Reinforcement Learning from Multi-modal Human Feedback

  • Jiaming Ji
  • Xinyu Chen
  • Rui Pan
  • Han Zhu
  • Jiahao Li
  • Donghai Hong
  • Boyuan Chen
  • Jiayi Zhou

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are essential for building general-purpose AI assistants; however, they pose increasing safety risks. How can we ensure safety alignment of MLLMs to prevent undesired behaviors? Going further, it is critical to explore how to fine-tune MLLMs to preserve capabilities while meeting safety constraints. Fundamentally, this challenge can be formulated as a min-max optimization problem. However, existing datasets have not yet disentangled single preference signals into explicit safety constraints, hindering systematic investigation in this direction. Moreover, it remains an open question whether such constraints can be effectively incorporated into the optimization process for multi-modal models. In this work, we present the first exploration of the Safe RLHF-V -- the first multimodal safety alignment framework. The framework consists of: (I) BeaverTails-V, the first open-source dataset featuring dual preference annotations for helpfulness and safety, supplemented with multi-level safety labels (minor, moderate, severe); (II) Beaver-Guard-V, a multi-level guardrail system to proactively defend against unsafe queries and adversarial attacks. Applying the guard model over five rounds of filtering and regeneration significantly enhances the precursor model’s overall safety by an average of 40. 9%. (II) Based on dual preference, we initiate the first exploration of multi-modal safety alignment within a constrained optimization. Experimental results demonstrate that Safe RLHF effectively improves both model helpfulness and safety. Specifically, Safe RLHF-V enhances model safety by 34. 2% and helpfulness by 34. 3%.

AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Sequence to Sequence Reward Modeling: Improving RLHF by Language Feedback

  • Jiayi Zhou
  • Jiaming Ji
  • Josef Dai
  • Yaodong Yang

Aligning the behavior of Large language models (LLMs) with human intentions and values remains a critical challenge. Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) aligns LLMs by training a reward model (RM) on human preferences and fine-tuning the LLMs to maximize RM feedback. Despite its effectiveness and popularity, RLHF is prone to biased local optimization. It means RM fails to provide feedback that accurately aligns with human preference, causing LLMs to explore unexpected generalizations, and failing to achieve alignment objectives. To mitigate this issue, we propose a novel sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) reward modeling method. Its key insight is that learning from language feedback rather than scalar feedback improves RLHF without additional annotations. We replaced the reward modeling target from binary maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) with sequence MLE. This method enables richer and fine-grained language feedback without additional annotations, models, or training stages. Our experiments demonstrated its effectiveness, specifically, reducing the refusal-to-response paradigm in single-turn safety dialogues and the long-response bias in text summarization tasks. We provide further analysis that seq2seq RM improves RLHF performance across 2B and 7B LLMs on 3 NLP tasks, achieving an average win rate of 76.9%. We further show that seq2seq RM can still improve the performance of RLHF under out-of-distribution prompts.

JMLR Journal 2024 Journal Article

OmniSafe: An Infrastructure for Accelerating Safe Reinforcement Learning Research

  • Jiaming Ji
  • Jiayi Zhou
  • Borong Zhang
  • Juntao Dai
  • Xuehai Pan
  • Ruiyang Sun
  • Weidong Huang
  • Yiran Geng

AI systems empowered by reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms harbor the immense potential to catalyze societal advancement, yet their deployment is often impeded by significant safety concerns. Particularly in safety-critical applications, researchers have raised concerns about unintended harms or unsafe behaviors of unaligned RL agents. The philosophy of safe reinforcement learning (SafeRL) is to align RL agents with harmless intentions and safe behavioral patterns. In SafeRL, agents learn to develop optimal policies by receiving feedback from the environment, while also fulfilling the requirement of minimizing the risk of unintended harm or unsafe behavior. However, due to the intricate nature of SafeRL algorithm implementation, combining methodologies across various domains presents a formidable challenge. This had led to an absence of a cohesive and efficacious learning framework within the contemporary SafeRL research milieu. In this work, we introduce a foundational framework designed to expedite SafeRL research endeavors. Our comprehensive framework encompasses an array of algorithms spanning different RL domains and places heavy emphasis on safety elements. Our efforts are to make the SafeRL-related research process more streamlined and efficient, therefore facilitating further research in AI safety. [abs] [ pdf ][ bib ] [ code ] &copy JMLR 2024. ( edit, beta )

NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Safety Gymnasium: A Unified Safe Reinforcement Learning Benchmark

  • Jiaming Ji
  • Borong Zhang
  • Jiayi Zhou
  • Xuehai Pan
  • Weidong Huang
  • Ruiyang Sun
  • Yiran Geng
  • Yifan Zhong

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems possess significant potential to drive societal progress. However, their deployment often faces obstacles due to substantial safety concerns. Safe reinforcement learning (SafeRL) emerges as a solution to optimize policies while simultaneously adhering to multiple constraints, thereby addressing the challenge of integrating reinforcement learning in safety-critical scenarios. In this paper, we present an environment suite called Safety-Gymnasium, which encompasses safety-critical tasks in both single and multi-agent scenarios, accepting vector and vision-only input. Additionally, we offer a library of algorithms named Safe Policy Optimization (SafePO), comprising 16 state-of-the-art SafeRL algorithms. This comprehensive library can serve as a validation tool for the research community. By introducing this benchmark, we aim to facilitate the evaluation and comparison of safety performance, thus fostering the development of reinforcement learning for safer, more reliable, and responsible real-world applications. The website of this project can be accessed at https: //sites. google. com/view/safety-gymnasium.

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