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Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is the prevailing approach to ensure Large Language Models (LLMs) align with human values. However, existing RLHF methods require a high computational cost, one main reason being that RLHF…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-08 Yu Zhu , Chuxiong Sun , Wenfei Yang , Wenqiang Wei , Bo Tang , Tianzhu Zhang , Zhiyu Li , Shifeng Zhang , Feiyu Xiong , Jie Hu , Mingchuan yang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made substantial strides in structured tasks through Reinforcement Learning (RL), demonstrating proficiency in mathematical reasoning and code generation. However, applying RL in broader domains like…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Hao Sun , Yunyi Shen , Jean-Francois Ton , Mihaela van der Schaar

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…

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant progress in performing complex tasks. While Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has been effective in aligning LLMs with human preferences, it is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Chaoqi Wang , Zhuokai Zhao , Yibo Jiang , Zhaorun Chen , Chen Zhu , Yuxin Chen , Jiayi Liu , Lizhu Zhang , Xiangjun Fan , Hao Ma , Sinong Wang

The alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) is critically dependent on reward models trained on costly human preference data. While recent work explores bypassing this cost with AI feedback, these methods often lack a rigorous theoretical…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Yi-Chen Li , Tian Xu , Yang Yu , Xuqin Zhang , Xiong-Hui Chen , Zhongxiang Ling , Ningjing Chao , Lei Yuan , Zhi-Hua Zhou

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and related alignment paradigms have become central to steering large language models (LLMs) and multimodal large language models (MLLMs) toward human-preferred behaviors. However, these…

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is the mainstream paradigm used to align large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. Yet existing RLHF heavily relies on accurate and informative reward models, which are vulnerable…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-15 Wei Shen , Xiaoying Zhang , Yuanshun Yao , Rui Zheng , Hongyi Guo , Yang Liu

Reinforcement learning (RL) often struggles with reward misalignment, where agents optimize given rewards but fail to exhibit the desired behaviors. This arises when the reward function incentivizes proxy behaviors misaligned with the true…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Mohammad Saif Nazir , Chayan Banerjee

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a pivotal technique for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences, yet it is susceptible to reward overoptimization, in which policy models overfit to the reward model,…

In practice, reinforcement learning (RL) agents are often trained with a possibly imperfect proxy reward function, which may lead to a human-agent alignment issue (i.e., the learned policy either converges to non-optimal performance with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Zhaohui Jiang , Xuening Feng , Paul Weng , Yifei Zhu , Yan Song , Tianze Zhou , Yujing Hu , Tangjie Lv , Changjie Fan

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

Reward models (RMs) play a critical role in enhancing the reasoning performance of LLMs. For example, they can provide training signals to finetune LLMs during reinforcement learning (RL) and help select the best answer from multiple…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Qiyuan Liu , Hao Xu , Xuhong Chen , Wei Chen , Yee Whye Teh , Ning Miao

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) offers a promising approach to aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. Typically, a reward model is trained or supplied to act as a proxy for humans in evaluating…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Jiahui Li , Lin Li , Tai-wei Chang , Kun Kuang , Long Chen , Jun Zhou , Cheng Yang

Reward Model (RM) has demonstrated impressive potential for enhancing Large Language Models (LLM), as RM can serve as a proxy for human preferences, providing signals to guide LLMs' behavior in various tasks. In this paper, we provide a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-18 Jialun Zhong , Wei Shen , Yanzeng Li , Songyang Gao , Hua Lu , Yicheng Chen , Yang Zhang , Wei Zhou , Jinjie Gu , Lei Zou

Despite the general capabilities of large pretrained language models, they consistently benefit from further adaptation to better achieve desired behaviors. However, tuning these models has become increasingly resource-intensive, or…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-26 Alisa Liu , Xiaochuang Han , Yizhong Wang , Yulia Tsvetkov , Yejin Choi , Noah A. Smith

Reward models play a critical role in guiding large language models toward outputs that align with human expectations. However, an open challenge remains in effectively utilizing test-time compute to enhance reward model performance. In…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Jiaxin Guo , Zewen Chi , Li Dong , Qingxiu Dong , Xun Wu , Shaohan Huang , Furu Wei

Reward models are central to large language model (LLM) post-training. However, past work has shown that they can reward spurious or undesirable attributes such as length, format, hallucinations, and sycophancy. In this work, we introduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Atticus Wang , Iván Arcuschin , Arthur Conmy

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

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has become a crucial technology for aligning language models with human values and intentions, enabling models to produce more helpful and harmless responses. Reward models are trained as…

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