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Reward hacking--where agents exploit flaws in imperfect reward functions rather than performing tasks as intended--poses risks for AI alignment. Reward hacking has been observed in real training runs, with coding agents learning to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Mia Taylor , James Chua , Jan Betley , Johannes Treutlein , Owain Evans

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a widely adopted approach for aligning large language models with human values. However, RLHF relies on a reward model that is trained with a limited amount of human preference data,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Shun Zhang , Zhenfang Chen , Sunli Chen , Yikang Shen , Zhiqing Sun , Chuang Gan

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has evolved to be one of the main methods for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs). However, existing RLHF methods are non-robust, and their performance deteriorates if the downstream…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Debmalya Mandal , Paulius Sasnauskas , Goran Radanovic

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

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has been widely adopted to align language models (LMs) with human preference. Prior RLHF works typically take a bandit formulation, which, though intuitive, ignores the sequential nature of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-07 Yueqin Yin , Shentao Yang , Yujia Xie , Ziyi Yang , Yuting Sun , Hany Awadalla , Weizhu Chen , Mingyuan Zhou

A reliable reward model is essential for aligning large language models with human preferences through reinforcement learning from human feedback. However, standard reward models are susceptible to spurious features that are not causally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Yupei Yang , Lin Yang , Wanxi Deng , Lin Qu , Fan Feng , Biwei Huang , Shikui Tu , Lei Xu

The effectiveness of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in continuous control robotics tasks is mainly dependent on the design of the underlying reward function, which is highly prone to reward hacking. A misalignment between the reward…

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…

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate transformative potential, yet their reasoning remains inconsistent and unreliable. Reinforcement learning (RL)-based fine-tuning is a key mechanism for improvement, but its effectiveness is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Pei-Chi Pan , Yingbin Liang , Sen Lin

While there has been progress towards aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human values and ensuring safe behaviour at inference time, safety guards can easily be removed when fine tuned on unsafe and harmful datasets. While this…

Reward hacking -- where RL agents exploit gaps in misspecified reward functions -- has been widely observed, but not yet systematically studied. To understand how reward hacking arises, we construct four RL environments with misspecified…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Alexander Pan , Kush Bhatia , Jacob Steinhardt

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is essential for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values. However, RLHF is susceptible to \emph{reward hacking}, where the agent exploits flaws in the reward function rather…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-22 Jiayi Fu , Xuandong Zhao , Chengyuan Yao , Heng Wang , Qi Han , Yanghua Xiao

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 from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a key technique for aligning the output of large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. To learn the reward function, most existing RLHF algorithms use the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-11 Kai Ye , Hongyi Zhou , Jin Zhu , Francesco Quinzan , Chengchun Shi

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

Language models (LMs) often exhibit undesirable text generation behaviors, including generating false, toxic, or irrelevant outputs. Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) - where human preference judgments on LM outputs are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Zeqiu Wu , Yushi Hu , Weijia Shi , Nouha Dziri , Alane Suhr , Prithviraj Ammanabrolu , Noah A. Smith , Mari Ostendorf , Hannaneh Hajishirzi

Reward models (RMs) are essential in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to align large language models (LLMs) with human values. However, RM training data is commonly recognized as low-quality, containing inductive biases…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Zhuo Li , Pengyu Cheng , Zhechao Yu , Feifei Tong , Anningzhe Gao , Tsung-Hui Chang , Xiang Wan , Erchao Zhao , Xiaoxi Jiang , Guanjun Jiang

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

Because it is difficult to precisely specify complex objectives, reinforcement learning policies are often optimized using proxy reward functions that only approximate the true goal. However, optimizing proxy rewards frequently leads to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-14 Cassidy Laidlaw , Shivam Singhal , Anca Dragan

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