English
Related papers

Related papers: Scaling Laws for Reward Model Overoptimization

200 papers

We address the issue of tuning hyperparameters (HPs) for imitation learning algorithms in the context of continuous-control, when the underlying reward function of the demonstrating expert cannot be observed at any time. The vast literature…

A common approach for aligning language models to human preferences is to first learn a reward model from preference data, and then use this reward model to update the language model. We study two closely related problems that arise in this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-22 Zihao Wang , Chirag Nagpal , Jonathan Berant , Jacob Eisenstein , Alex D'Amour , Sanmi Koyejo , Victor Veitch

Reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF), which learns a reward model from human preference data and then optimizes a policy to favor preferred responses, has emerged as a central paradigm for aligning large language models (LLMs)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-29 Gen Li , Yuling Yan

Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a key paradigm for task-specific fine-tuning of language models using human preference data. While numerous publicly available preference datasets provide pairwise comparisons…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Ashwin Kumar , Yuzi He , Aram H. Markosyan , Bobbie Chern , Imanol Arrieta-Ibarra

Reward models are key in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) systems, aligning the model behavior with human preferences. Particularly in the math domain, there have been plenty of studies using reward models to align policies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-03 Sunghwan Kim , Dongjin Kang , Taeyoon Kwon , Hyungjoo Chae , Jungsoo Won , Dongha Lee , Jinyoung Yeo

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has achieved considerable success in aligning large language models (LLMs) by modeling human preferences with a learnable reward model and employing a reinforcement learning algorithm to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Jianfeng Cai , Jinhua Zhu , Ruopei Sun , Yue Wang , Li Li , Wengang Zhou , Houqiang Li

Reward modeling (RM), which captures human preferences to align large language models (LLMs), is increasingly employed in tasks such as model finetuning, response filtering, and ranking. However, due to the inherent complexity of human…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Pankayaraj Pathmanathan , Furong Huang

In this study, we investigate the enhancement of the GPT Neo 125M performance in Community Question Answering (CQA) with a focus on programming, through the integration of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-22 Alexey Gorbatovski , Sergey Kovalchuk

This work proposes `PET', a novel pessimistic reward fine-tuning method, to learn a pessimistic reward model robust against reward hacking in offline reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Traditional reward modeling techniques…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Yinglun Xu , Hangoo Kang , Tarun Suresh , Yuxuan Wan , Gagandeep Singh

In reinforcement learning from human feedback, preference-based reward models play a central role in aligning large language models to human-aligned behavior. However, recent studies show that these models are prone to reward hacking and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Wenqian Ye , Guangtao Zheng , Aidong Zhang

Learning reward functions from data is a promising path towards achieving scalable Reinforcement Learning (RL) for robotics. However, a major challenge in training agents from learned reward models is that the agent can learn to exploit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-04 Danfei Xu , Misha Denil

Specifying rewards for reinforcement learned (RL) agents is challenging. Preference-based RL (PbRL) mitigates these challenges by inferring a reward from feedback over sets of trajectories. However, the effectiveness of PbRL is limited by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-20 Mudit Verma , Katherine Metcalf

Foundation models, specifically Large Language Models (LLMs), have lately gained wide-spread attention and adoption. Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) involves training a reward model to capture desired behaviors, which is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-25 Will LeVine , Benjamin Pikus , Anthony Chen , Sean Hendryx

The alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) is critically dependent on reward models trained on costly human preference data. While recent work explores bypassing this cost with AI feedback, these methods often lack a rigorous theoretical…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Yi-Chen Li , Tian Xu , Yang Yu , Xuqin Zhang , Xiong-Hui Chen , Zhongxiang Ling , Ningjing Chao , Lei Yuan , Zhi-Hua Zhou

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has become a core post-training step for aligning large language models, yet the reward signal used in RLHF is only a learned proxy for true human utility. From an operations research…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Yikai Wang , Shang Liu , Jose Blanchet

Studies of reinforcement learning in humans and animals have demonstrated a preference for options that yielded relatively better outcomes in the past, even when those options are associated with lower absolute reward. The present study…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-29 William M. Hayes , Nicolas Yax , Stefano Palminteri

Reward models (RMs) have become essential for aligning large language models (LLMs), serving as scalable proxies for human evaluation in both training and inference. However, existing RMs struggle on knowledge-intensive and long-form tasks,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-30 Ziyou Hu , Zhengliang Shi , Minghang Zhu , Haitao Li , Teng Sun , Pengjie Ren , Suzan Verberne , Zhaochun Ren

An effective reward model plays a pivotal role in reinforcement learning for post-training enhancement of visual generative models. However, current approaches of reward modeling suffer from implementation complexity due to their reliance…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-06-27 Runtao Liu , Jiahao Zhan , Yingqing He , Chen Wei , Alan Yuille , Qifeng Chen

We study reinforcement learning (RL) problems in which agents observe the reward or transition realizations at their current state before deciding which action to take. Such observations are available in many applications, including…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Nadav Merlis

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents require the specification of a reward signal for learning behaviours. However, introduction of corrupt or stochastic rewards can yield high variance in learning. Such corruption may be a direct result of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-09 Joshua Romoff , Peter Henderson , Alexandre Piché , Vincent Francois-Lavet , Joelle Pineau