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How can we make models robust to even imperfect human feedback? In reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), human preferences over model outputs are used to train a reward model that assigns scalar values to responses. Because…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Tiffany Horter , Andrew Markham , Niki Trigoni , Serena Booth

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is commonly employed to tailor models to human preferences, especially to improve the safety of outputs from large language models (LLMs). Traditionally, this method depends on selecting…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-29 Xiaomin Li , Mingye Gao , Zhiwei Zhang , Jingxuan Fan , Weiyu Li

For a real-world decision-making problem, the reward function often needs to be engineered or learned. A popular approach is to utilize human feedback to learn a reward function for training. The most straightforward way to do so is to ask…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Xiang Ji , Huazheng Wang , Minshuo Chen , Tuo Zhao , Mengdi Wang

Learning from human feedback (LHF) -- and in particular learning from pairwise preferences -- has recently become a crucial ingredient in training large language models (LLMs), and has been the subject of much research. Most recent works…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-11 Vincent Dumoulin , Daniel D. Johnson , Pablo Samuel Castro , Hugo Larochelle , Yann Dauphin

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has become a pivotal paradigm in artificial intelligence to align large models with human preferences. In this paper, we propose a novel statistical framework to simultaneously conduct the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-01 Nan Lu , Ethan Lee , Ethan X. Fang , Junwei Lu

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has become a dominating strategy in aligning Language Models (LMs) with human values/goals. The key to the strategy is learning a reward model ($\varphi$), which can reflect the latent…

Reward modeling is crucial for aligning large language models with human preferences, yet current approaches lack a principled mathematical framework for leveraging ordinal preference data. When human annotators provide graded preferences…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Amirhossein Afsharrad , Ruida Zhou , Luca Viano , Sanjay Lall , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh

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

We address the challenge of online Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) with a focus on self-rewarding alignment methods. In online RLHF, obtaining feedback requires interaction with the environment, which can be costly when…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Ruijie Xu , Zhihan Liu , Yongfei Liu , Shipeng Yan , Zhaoran Wang , Zhi Zhang , Xuming He

Reward functions are notoriously difficult to specify, especially for tasks with complex goals. Reward learning approaches attempt to infer reward functions from human feedback and preferences. Prior works on reward learning have mainly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-11 Lev McKinney , Yawen Duan , David Krueger , Adam Gleave

Large language models are typically aligned with human preferences by optimizing $\textit{reward models}$ (RMs) fitted to human feedback. However, human preferences are multi-faceted, and it is increasingly common to derive reward from a…

Preference-based learning of reward functions, where the reward function is learned using comparison data, has been well studied for complex robotic tasks such as autonomous driving. Existing algorithms have focused on learning reward…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-03-05 Sydney M. Katz , Amir Maleki , Erdem Bıyık , Mykel J. Kochenderfer

Reward models (RMs) play a crucial role in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), aligning model behavior with human preferences. However, existing benchmarks for reward models show a weak correlation with the performance of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Sunghwan Kim , Dongjin Kang , Taeyoon Kwon , Hyungjoo Chae , Dongha Lee , Jinyoung Yeo

Designing an effective reward function has long been a challenge in reinforcement learning, particularly for complex tasks in unstructured environments. To address this, various learning paradigms have emerged that leverage different forms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Muhammad Qasim Elahi , Somtochukwu Oguchienti , Maheed H. Ahmed , Mahsa Ghasemi

While large-scale unsupervised language models (LMs) learn broad world knowledge and some reasoning skills, achieving precise control of their behavior is difficult due to the completely unsupervised nature of their training. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-31 Rafael Rafailov , Archit Sharma , Eric Mitchell , Stefano Ermon , Christopher D. Manning , Chelsea Finn

Generating complex behaviors that satisfy the preferences of non-expert users is a crucial requirement for AI agents. Interactive reward learning from trajectory comparisons (a.k.a. RLHF) is one way to allow non-expert users to convey…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-03-01 Lin Guan , Karthik Valmeekam , Subbarao Kambhampati

Margin-based optimization is fundamental to improving generalization and robustness in classification tasks. In the context of reward model learning from preferences within Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), existing methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Yaswanth Chittepu , Prasann Singhal , Greg Durrett , Scott Niekum

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

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) has become a key factor in aligning model behavior with users' goals. However, while humans integrate multiple strategies when making decisions, current RLHF approaches often simplify this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Mingkang Wu , Devin White , Evelyn Rose , Vernon Lawhern , Nicholas R Waytowich , Yongcan Cao