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Related papers: Mitigating the Alignment Tax of RLHF

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Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has become a popular approach to align language models (LMs) with human preferences. This method involves collecting a large dataset of human pairwise preferences across various text…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Antoine Scheid , Etienne Boursier , Alain Durmus , Michael I. Jordan , Pierre Ménard , Eric Moulines , Michal Valko

The alignment of large language models (LLMs) with human values is critical as these models become increasingly integrated into various societal and decision-making processes. Traditional methods, such as reinforcement learning from human…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-08 Prashant Trivedi , Souradip Chakraborty , Avinash Reddy , Vaneet Aggarwal , Amrit Singh Bedi , George K. Atia

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has demonstrated effectiveness in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, token-level RLHF suffers from the credit assignment problem over long sequences,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Yekun Chai , Haoran Sun , Huang Fang , Shuohuan Wang , Yu Sun , Hua Wu

This paper addresses the challenge of aligning large language models (LLMs) with diverse human preferences within federated learning (FL) environments, where standard methods often fail to adequately represent diverse viewpoints. We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-17 Mahmoud Srewa , Tianyu Zhao , Salma Elmalaki

Heterogeneity is an unwanted variation when analyzing aggregated datasets from multiple sources. Though different methods have been proposed for heterogeneity adjustment, no systematic theory exists to justify these methods. In this work,…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-02-18 Jianqing Fan , Han Liu , Weichen Wang , Ziwei Zhu

In Large Language Model (LLM) development, Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is crucial for aligning models with human values and preferences. RLHF traditionally relies on the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Atoosa Chegini , Hamid Kazemi , Iman Mirzadeh , Dong Yin , Maxwell Horton , Moin Nabi , Mehrdad Farajtabar , Keivan Alizadeh

Many imitation learning (IL) algorithms use inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) to infer a reward function that aligns with the demonstration. However, the inferred reward functions often fail to capture the underlying task objectives. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Weichao Zhou , Wenchao Li

Aligning generative models with human preference via RLHF typically suffers from overoptimization, where an imperfectly learned reward model can misguide the generative model to output undesired responses. We investigate this problem in a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-05 Zhihan Liu , Miao Lu , Shenao Zhang , Boyi Liu , Hongyi Guo , Yingxiang Yang , Jose Blanchet , Zhaoran Wang

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has become central to aligning large language models with human values, typically by first learning a reward model from preference data which is then used to update the model with…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Keertana Chidambaram , Karthik Vinary Seetharaman , Vasilis Syrgkanis

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has become central to aligning large language models with human values, typically by first learning a reward model from preference data which is then used to update the model with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Keertana Chidambaram , Karthik Vinay Seetharaman , Vasilis Syrgkanis

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) enables powerful LLM alignment but can introduce reward hacking - models exploit spurious correlations in proxy rewards without genuine alignment. Compounding this, the objectives…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Mohammad Beigi , Ming Jin , Junshan Zhang , Jiaxin Zhang , Qifan Wang , Lifu Huang

Preference-based alignment like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) learns from pairwise preferences, yet the labels are often noisy and inconsistent. Existing uncertainty-aware approaches weight preferences, but ignore a more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Tiejin Chen , Xiaoou Liu , Vishnu Nandam , Kuan-Ru Liou , Hua Wei

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved significant advancements, however, the common learning paradigm treats LLMs as passive information repositories, neglecting their potential for active learning and alignment. Some approaches train…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-18 Yiming Liang , Ge Zhang , Xingwei Qu , Tianyu Zheng , Jiawei Guo , Xinrun Du , Zhenzhu Yang , Jiaheng Liu , Chenghua Lin , Lei Ma , Wenhao Huang , Jiajun Zhang

Large language model (LLM) alignment algorithms typically consist of post-training over preference pairs. While such algorithms are widely used to enable safety guardrails and align LLMs with general human preferences, we show that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 John T. Halloran

The success of AI assistants based on language models (LLMs) hinges crucially on Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), which enables the generation of responses more aligned with human preferences. As universal AI assistants,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-27 Rui Zheng , Wei Shen , Yuan Hua , Wenbin Lai , Shihan Dou , Yuhao Zhou , Zhiheng Xi , Xiao Wang , Haoran Huang , Tao Gui , Qi Zhang , Xuanjing Huang

Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods like LoRA have significantly improved the adaptation of LLMs to downstream tasks in a resource-efficient manner. However, in multi-task scenarios, challenges such as training imbalance and the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Xujia Wang , Haiyan Zhao , Shuo Wang , Hanqing Wang , Zhiyuan Liu

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has become one of the most widely used fine-tuning mechanisms for adapting large language models to new domains, tasks, and users. Yet adaptation performance alone can obscure an important failure mode: LoRA…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Runze Xu , Arpit Garg , Hemanth Saratchandran , Simon Lucey

Fine-grained control over large language models (LLMs) remains a significant challenge, hindering their adaptability to diverse user needs. While Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) shows promise in aligning LLMs, its reliance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-07 Haoxiang Wang , Yong Lin , Wei Xiong , Rui Yang , Shizhe Diao , Shuang Qiu , Han Zhao , Tong Zhang

With the rapid advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), aligning LLMs with human preferences become increasingly important. Although Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) proves effective, it is complicated and highly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Shiqi Wang , Zhengze Zhang , Rui Zhao , Fei Tan , Cam Tu Nguyen

Adapting language models (LMs) to new tasks via post-training carries the risk of degrading existing capabilities -- a phenomenon classically known as catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, toward identifying guidelines for mitigating this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Howard Chen , Noam Razin , Karthik Narasimhan , Danqi Chen