It depends on the model and the problem. As an example, BERT-based models have a special [CLS] token that was pre-trained to encode information about the whole

It depends on the model and the problem. As an example, BERT-based models have a special [CLS] token that was pre-trained to encode information about the whole sequence. A reward model based on BERT would take the output embedding of that token from the last layer and feed it through a classification head, which would depend on your problem. You could then train this classification head on your alignment dataset like a classification problem. You can check the examples from the TRL library for more information.