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Related papers: Mitigating the Alignment Tax of RLHF

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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

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has been proven to be an effective method for preference alignment of large language models (LLMs) and is widely used in the post-training process of LLMs. However, RLHF struggles with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Dongxu Liu , Bing Xu , Yinzhuo Chen , Bufan Xu , Wenpeng Lu , Muyun Yang , Tiejun Zhao

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is increasingly used to align large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, the effectiveness of RLHF in addressing underlying biases remains unclear. This study investigates…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-13 Logan Barnhart , Reza Akbarian Bafghi , Stephen Becker , Maziar Raissi

Federated Learning (FL) facilitates the fine-tuning of Foundation Models (FMs) using distributed data sources, with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) gaining popularity due to its low communication costs and strong performance. While recent work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Zihao Peng , Jiandian Zeng , Boyuan Li , Guo Li , Shengbo Chen , Tian Wang

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) aligns Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences, yet the underlying reward signals they internalize remain hidden, posing a critical challenge for interpretability and safety.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Nyal Patel , Matthieu Bou , Arjun Jagota , Satyapriya Krishna , Sonali Parbhoo

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has shown promise in aligning large language models (LLMs). Yet its reliance on a singular reward model often overlooks the diversity of human preferences. Recent approaches address this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-23 Tianze Wang , Dongnan Gui , Yifan Hu , Shuhang Lin , Linjun Zhang

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) to align with user preferences is challenging due to the high cost of quality human annotations in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and the generalizability limitations of AI…

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences through reinforcement learning (RLHF) can lead to reward hacking, where LLMs exploit failures in the reward model (RM) to achieve seemingly high rewards without meeting the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-23 Alexandre Ramé , Nino Vieillard , Léonard Hussenot , Robert Dadashi , Geoffrey Cideron , Olivier Bachem , Johan Ferret

In continual learning, where task data arrives in a sequence, fine-tuning on later tasks will often lead to performance degradation on earlier tasks. This is especially pronounced when these tasks come from diverse domains. In this setting,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-13 Anat Kleiman , Gintare Karolina Dziugaite , Jonathan Frankle , Sham Kakade , Mansheej Paul

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (\textbf{RLHF}) has emerged as a dominant approach for aligning LLM outputs with human preferences. Inspired by the success of RLHF, we study the performance of multiple algorithms that learn from…

We study estimation and statistical inference for reward models used in aligning large language models (LLMs). A key component of LLM alignment is reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), where humans compare pairs of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-04 Pangpang Liu , Junwei Lu , Will Wei Sun

Language model (LM) alignment improves model outputs to reflect human preferences while preserving the capabilities of the base model. The most common alignment approaches are (i) reinforcement learning, which maximizes the expected reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Lucas Monteiro Paes , Natalie Mackraz , Barry-John Theobald , Federico Danieli

Large language models (LLMs) are trained on a deluge of text data with limited quality control. As a result, LLMs can exhibit unintended or even harmful behaviours, such as leaking information, fake news or hate speech. Countermeasures,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-05 Jingtong Su , Julia Kempe , Karen Ullrich

Large language models are first pre-trained on trillions of tokens and then instruction-tuned or aligned to specific preferences. While pre-training remains out of reach for most researchers due to the compute required, fine-tuning has…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-10 Megh Thakkar , Quentin Fournier , Matthew D Riemer , Pin-Yu Chen , Amal Zouaq , Payel Das , Sarath Chandar

Alignment with human preference is a desired property of large language models (LLMs). Currently, the main alignment approach is based on reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Despite the effectiveness of RLHF, it is intricate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Geyang Guo , Ranchi Zhao , Tianyi Tang , Wayne Xin Zhao , Ji-Rong Wen

The reward model has become increasingly important in alignment, assessment, and data construction for large language models (LLMs). Most existing researchers focus on enhancing reward models through data improvements, following the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-09 Shujun Liu , Xiaoyu Shen , Yuhang Lai , Siyuan Wang , Shengbin Yue , Zengfeng Huang , Xuanjing Huang , Zhongyu Wei

Reinforcement Learning frameworks, particularly those utilizing human annotations, have become an increasingly popular method for preference fine-tuning, where the outputs of a language model are tuned to match a certain set of behavioral…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Archie Chaudhury

Multi-task learning (MTL) benefits the fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) by providing a single model with improved performance and generalization ability across tasks, presenting a resource-efficient alternative to developing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Zi Gong , Hang Yu , Cong Liao , Bingchang Liu , Chaoyu Chen , Jianguo Li

Safety post-training can improve the harmfulness and policy compliance of Large Language Models (LLMs), but it may also reduce general utility, a phenomenon often described as the \emph{alignment tax}. We study this trade-off through the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Guanglong Sun , Siyuan Zhang , Liyuan Wang , Jun Zhu , Hang Su , Yi Zhong

Reward models play a key role in aligning language model applications towards human preferences. However, this setup creates an incentive for the language model to exploit errors in the reward model to achieve high estimated reward, a…