Steered Not Stirred: Effective Reward Tilting using Surrogate Reward Mixing

Alec Sargood, Olivia Gallup, Georg Maierhofer, Noam Ghenassia, Paul Duckworth +2

Continuous-time generative models, from diffusion models, flow matching, and now flow maps, owe their practical value to high-fidelity generation and steerability. In many applications, a ground-truth latent ``oracle'' reward $R^*$ is unavailable or expensive to evaluate, e.g., human judgments or experimental measurements. Although the oracle reward is not directly observable, it can often be approximated through multiple cheaper surrogates that, individually, provide incomplete characterizations but collectively reveal substantial information about the downstream task. In this paper, we present a method for composing such surrogates to steer a pretrained model toward the distribution tilted by an unavailable $R^*$. Given a small feedback set of oracle rankings or numerical rewards, we introduce Mixing And Reward Tilting for INference-time Improvement (MARTINI), which learns a surrogate composition for plug-and-play use with standard inference-time steering methods. Our theory characterizes surrogate information limits and relates population recovery error to ideal-target KL at small tilt strength. For preferences, the bound additionally accounts for an irreducible mismatch…