Unsupervised Elicitation of Language Models

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission12310 Authors

Keywords: language models, post-training, elicitation

TL;DR: We propose an unsupervised method to post-train pre-trained language models, which can match or exceeds real-world human supervision even at production scale.

Abstract: To steer pretrained language models for downstream tasks, today's post-training paradigm relies on humans to specify desired behaviors. However, for models with superhuman capabilities, it is difficult or impossible to get high-quality human supervision. To address this challenge, we introduce a new unsupervised algorithm, Internal Coherence Maximization (ICM), to fine-tune pretrained language models on their own generated labels, without external supervision. On GSM8k-verification, TruthfulQA, and Alpaca reward modeling tasks, our method matches the performance of training on golden labels and outperforms training on crowdsourced human supervision. On tasks where LMs' capabilities are strongly superhuman, our method can elicit those capabilities significantly better than training on human labels. Finally, we show that our method can improve the training of frontier LMs: we use our method to train an unsupervised reward model and use reinforcement learning to train a Claude 4 Sonnet-based assistant. The resulting assistant matches its counterpart trained on production-grade human labels on average, with higher scores on chat and safety yet lower scores on math and coding.

Primary Area: unsupervised, self-supervised, semi-supervised, and supervised representation learning

Submission Number: 12310