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Related papers: Is RLHF More Difficult than Standard RL?

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Collecting high-quality preference datasets for reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is resource-intensive and challenging. As a result, researchers often train reward models on extensive offline datasets which aggregate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Shambhavi Krishna , Aishwarya Sahoo

Conventional reinforcement learning (RL) approaches often struggle to learn effective policies under sparse reward conditions, necessitating the manual design of complex, task-specific reward functions. To address this limitation,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Suzie Kim

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is the standard method to align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences. In this work, we introduce alignment tampering, a potential vulnerability where the LLM undergoing…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Dongyoon Hahm , Dylan Hadfield-Menell , Kimin Lee

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has been widely adopted to align language models (LMs) with human preference. Prior RLHF works typically take a bandit formulation, which, though intuitive, ignores the sequential nature of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-07 Yueqin Yin , Shentao Yang , Yujia Xie , Ziyi Yang , Yuting Sun , Hany Awadalla , Weizhu Chen , Mingyuan Zhou

Reward model (RM) plays a pivotal role in reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) for aligning large language models (LLMs). However, classical RMs trained on human preferences are vulnerable to reward hacking and generalize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Zhenghao Xu , Qin Lu , Qingru Zhang , Liang Qiu , Ilgee Hong , Changlong Yu , Wenlin Yao , Yao Liu , Haoming Jiang , Lihong Li , Hyokun Yun , Tuo Zhao

Reward learning enables the application of reinforcement learning (RL) to tasks where reward is defined by human judgment, building a model of reward by asking humans questions. Most work on reward learning has used simulated environments,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-01-10 Daniel M. Ziegler , Nisan Stiennon , Jeffrey Wu , Tom B. Brown , Alec Radford , Dario Amodei , Paul Christiano , Geoffrey Irving

Learning a reward function from human preferences is challenging as it typically requires having a high-fidelity simulator or using expensive and potentially unsafe actual physical rollouts in the environment. However, in many tasks the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-05 Daniel Shin , Anca D. Dragan , Daniel S. Brown

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has become a cornerstone for aligning large language models with human preferences. However, the heterogeneity of human feedback, driven by diverse individual contexts and preferences, poses…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-05 Seong Jin Lee , Will Wei Sun , Yufeng Liu

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) are pivotal methodologies in reward learning, which involve inferring and shaping the underlying reward function of sequential decision-making…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-16 Kihyun Kim , Jiawei Zhang , Asuman Ozdaglar , Pablo A. Parrilo

Human-designed reward functions for reinforcement learning (RL) agents are frequently misaligned with the humans' true, unobservable objectives, and thus act only as proxies. Optimizing for a misspecified proxy reward function often induces…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Stephane Hatgis-Kessell , Logan Mondal Bhamidipaty , Emma Brunskill

Learning rewards from preference feedback has become an important tool in the alignment of agentic models. Preference-based feedback, often implemented as a binary comparison between multiple completions, is an established method to acquire…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Yannick Metz , András Geiszl , Raphaël Baur , Mennatallah El-Assady

As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to progress toward more advanced forms of intelligence, Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is increasingly seen as a key pathway toward achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-17 Yuzi Yan , Xingzhou Lou , Jialian Li , Yiping Zhang , Jian Xie , Chao Yu , Yu Wang , Dong Yan , Yuan Shen

Spurious correlations in a reward model's training data can prevent Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) from identifying the desired goal and induce unwanted behaviors. This paper shows that offline RLHF is susceptible to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-16 Xin Chen , Sam Toyer , Florian Shkurti

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has achieved impressive empirical successes while relying on a small amount of human feedback. However, there is limited theoretical justification for this phenomenon. Additionally, most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Yihan Du , Anna Winnicki , Gal Dalal , Shie Mannor , R. Srikant

Offline preference-based reinforcement learning (RL), which focuses on optimizing policies using human preferences between pairs of trajectory segments selected from an offline dataset, has emerged as a practical avenue for RL applications.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-08 Chen-Xiao Gao , Shengjun Fang , Chenjun Xiao , Yang Yu , Zongzhang Zhang

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a key technique for post-training large language models. Despite its empirical success, the theoretical understanding of RLHF is still limited, as learning the KL-regularized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Di Wu , Chengshuai Shi , Jing Yang , Cong Shen

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) has shown remarkable success in aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences. Traditional RLHF methods rely on a fixed dataset, which often suffers from limited coverage. To…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Long-Fei Li , Yu-Yang Qian , Peng Zhao , Zhi-Hua Zhou

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) plays a crucial role in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values and preferences. However, the quality and stability of the trained reward model largely determine the final…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-17 Chunjin Jian , Xinhua Zhu

This paper focuses on reinforcement learning (RL) with limited prior knowledge. In the domain of swarm robotics for instance, the expert can hardly design a reward function or demonstrate the target behavior, forbidding the use of both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-08-07 Riad Akrour , Marc Schoenauer , Michèle Sebag