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Reinforcement learning from human feedback usually models preferences using a reward function that does not distinguish between people. We argue that this is unlikely to be a good design choice in contexts with high potential for…

Recent advances in aligning Large Language Models with human preferences have benefited from larger reward models and better preference data. However, most of these methodologies rely on the accuracy of the reward model. The reward models…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Debangshu Banerjee , Aditya Gopalan

The success of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) critically depends on the quality of the reward model. However, while this quality is primarily evaluated through accuracy, it remains unclear whether accuracy fully captures…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Noam Razin , Zixuan Wang , Hubert Strauss , Stanley Wei , Jason D. Lee , Sanjeev Arora

To ensure that large language model (LLM) responses are helpful and non-toxic, a reward model trained on human preference data is usually used. LLM responses with high rewards are then selected through best-of-$n$ (BoN) sampling or the LLM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-04 Adam X. Yang , Maxime Robeyns , Thomas Coste , Zhengyan Shi , Jun Wang , Haitham Bou-Ammar , Laurence Aitchison

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is the mainstream paradigm used to align large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. Yet existing RLHF heavily relies on accurate and informative reward models, which are vulnerable…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-15 Wei Shen , Xiaoying Zhang , Yuanshun Yao , Rui Zheng , Hongyi Guo , Yang Liu

The success of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) in language model alignment is strongly dependent on the quality of the underlying reward model. In this paper, we present a novel approach to improve reward model quality by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Alizée Pace , Jonathan Mallinson , Eric Malmi , Sebastian Krause , Aliaksei Severyn

Rewards serve as proxies for human preferences and play a crucial role in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). However, if these rewards are inherently imperfect, exhibiting various biases, they can adversely affect the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Sheng Ouyang , Yulan Hu , Ge Chen , Qingyang Li , Fuzheng Zhang , Yong Liu

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a widely used method for aligning large language models with human preferences. However, RLHF often suffers from reward model overoptimisation, in which models overfit to the reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Lorenz Wolf , Robert Kirk , Mirco Musolesi

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a widely used framework for the training of language models. However, the process of using RLHF to develop a language model that is well-aligned presents challenges, especially when it…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-09 Bowen Qin , Duanyu Feng , Xi Yang

In practice, reinforcement learning (RL) agents are often trained with a possibly imperfect proxy reward function, which may lead to a human-agent alignment issue (i.e., the learned policy either converges to non-optimal performance with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Zhaohui Jiang , Xuening Feng , Paul Weng , Yifei Zhu , Yan Song , Tianze Zhou , Yujing Hu , Tangjie Lv , Changjie Fan

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback significantly enhances Natural Language Processing by aligning language models with human expectations. A critical factor in this alignment is the strength of reward models used during training.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-17 Yanjun Chen , Dawei Zhu , Yirong Sun , Xinghao Chen , Wei Zhang , Xiaoyu Shen

Inferring reward functions from human behavior is at the center of value alignment - aligning AI objectives with what we, humans, actually want. But doing so relies on models of how humans behave given their objectives. After decades of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Joey Hong , Kush Bhatia , Anca Dragan

Existing alignment methods directly use the reward model learned from user preference data to optimize an LLM policy, subject to KL regularization with respect to the base policy. This practice is suboptimal for maximizing user's utility…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Haichuan Wang , Tao Lin , Lingkai Kong , Ce Li , Hezi Jiang , Milind Tambe

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and, at its core, reward modeling have become a crucial part of training powerful large language models (LLMs). One commonly overlooked factor in training high-quality reward models (RMs) is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-19 Kian Ahrabian , Pegah Jandaghi , Negar Mokhberian , Sai Praneeth Karimireddy , Jay Pujara

Personalized alignment from preference data has focused primarily on improving personal reward model (RM) accuracy, with the implicit assumption that better preference ranking translates to better personalized behavior. However, in…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Fady Rezk , Yuangang Pan , Chuan-Sheng Foo , Xun Xu , Nancy Chen , Henry Gouk , Timothy Hospedales

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback aligns the outputs of Large Language Models with human values and preferences. Central to this process is the reward model (RM), which translates human feedback into training signals for optimising…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Zeyu Huang , Zihan Qiu , Zili Wang , Edoardo M. Ponti , Ivan Titov

Reward-model-based fine-tuning is a central paradigm in aligning Large Language Models with human preferences. However, such approaches critically rely on the assumption that proxy reward models accurately reflect intended supervision, a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Zixuan Liu , Siavash H. Khajavi , Guangkai Jiang , Xinru Liu

Designing a reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) algorithm to approximate a human's unobservable reward function requires assuming, implicitly or explicitly, a model of human preferences. A preference model that poorly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Stephane Hatgis-Kessell , W. Bradley Knox , Serena Booth , Peter Stone

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) emerges as a promising paradigm for aligning large language models (LLMs). However, a notable challenge in RLHF is overoptimization, where beyond a certain threshold, the pursuit of higher…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-02 Yuanzhao Zhai , Han Zhang , Yu Lei , Yue Yu , Kele Xu , Dawei Feng , Bo Ding , Huaimin Wang

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a prevalent approach to align AI systems with human values by learning rewards from human preference data. Due to various reasons, however, such data typically takes the form of rankings…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Ilgee Hong , Zichong Li , Alexander Bukharin , Yixiao Li , Haoming Jiang , Tianbao Yang , Tuo Zhao