RewardExplainer: Learning Reward Model Explanations from Counterfactual Preference Feedback
Reward models (RMs) are a key component of large language model post-training, providing reward signals for subsequent reinforcement learning. However, conventional discriminative RMs typically output only scalar scores, making it difficult to identify the response behaviors associated with their scoring decisions. Existing interpretation methods often rely on predefined high-level attributes and require repeated counterfactual interventions for each response pair to validate candidate explanations, lacking a closed-loop mechanism that uses RMs' feedback to train a reusable explainer. To address this, we propose RewardExplainer, a framework that obtains feedback from the target reward mod...
| Authors | Jingyi He, Nier Wu, Shuang Liu et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 27 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 27 September 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.