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Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences has become essential for safe and beneficial AI deployment. While Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) established the dominant paradigm, a proliferation of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Tarun Raheja , Nilay Pochhi

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been used to finetune Large Language Models (LLMs) using a reward model trained from preference data, to better align with human judgment. The recently introduced direct alignment methods, which are often…

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

Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) is a paradigm in which an RL agent learns to optimize a task using pair-wise preference-based feedback over trajectories, rather than explicit reward signals. While PbRL has demonstrated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-18 Wenhao Zhan , Masatoshi Uehara , Wen Sun , Jason D. Lee

Great success has been reported using Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) to align large language models, with open preference datasets enabling wider experimentation, particularly for "helpfulness" in tasks like dialogue and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-12 Prasann Singhal , Tanya Goyal , Jiacheng Xu , Greg Durrett

While Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) effectively aligns pretrained Large Language and Vision-Language Models (LLMs, and VLMs) with human preferences, its computational cost and complexity hamper its wider adoption. To…

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

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

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

In this article, we investigate the alignment of Large Language Models according to human preferences. We discuss the features of training a Preference Model, which simulates human preferences, and the methods and details we found essential…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-03 Alexey Kutalev , Sergei Markoff

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

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-12-15 Suzie Kim , Hye-Bin Shin , Seong-Whan Lee

Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as an influential technique, enabling the alignment of large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. Despite the promising potential of RLHF, how to protect user…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Jiaming Zhang , Mingxi Lei , Meng Ding , Mengdi Li , Zihang Xiang , Difei Xu , Jinhui Xu , Di Wang

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is currently the leading approach for aligning large language models with human preferences. Typically, these models rely on extensive offline preference datasets for training. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Avinandan Bose , Zhihan Xiong , Aadirupa Saha , Simon Shaolei Du , Maryam Fazel

We consider the problem of preference based reinforcement learning (PbRL), where, unlike traditional reinforcement learning, an agent receives feedback only in terms of a 1 bit (0/1) preference over a trajectory pair instead of absolute…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-07 Aldo Pacchiano , Aadirupa Saha , Jonathan Lee

Large Language Models (LLMs) can acquire extensive world knowledge through pre-training on large corpora. However, due to exposure to low-quality data, LLMs may exhibit harmful behavior without aligning with human values. The dominant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-11 Tianhao Wu , Banghua Zhu , Ruoyu Zhang , Zhaojin Wen , Kannan Ramchandran , Jiantao Jiao

Preference learning algorithms (e.g., RLHF and DPO) are frequently used to steer LLMs to produce generations that are more preferred by humans, but our understanding of their inner workings is still limited. In this work, we study the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Angelica Chen , Sadhika Malladi , Lily H. Zhang , Xinyi Chen , Qiuyi Zhang , Rajesh Ranganath , Kyunghyun Cho

Preference-based reinforcement learning (RL) provides a framework to train agents using human preferences between two behaviors. However, preference-based RL has been challenging to scale since it requires a large amount of human feedback…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-03 Changyeon Kim , Jongjin Park , Jinwoo Shin , Honglak Lee , Pieter Abbeel , Kimin Lee

Current RLHF methods such as PPO and DPO typically reduce human preferences to binary labels, which are costly to obtain and too coarse to reflect individual variation. We observe that expressions of satisfaction and dissatisfaction follow…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 YuXuan Zhang

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 extensively employed to align large language models with user intent. However, proximal policy optimization (PPO) based RLHF is occasionally unstable requiring significant…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Saeed Khaki , JinJin Li , Lan Ma , Liu Yang , Prathap Ramachandra