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Reward models (RMs) are a critical component of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). However, conventional dense RMs are susceptible to exploitation by policy models through biases or spurious correlations, resulting in reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Lingling Fu , Yongfu Xue

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences is critical to recent advances in generative artificial intelligence. Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is widely applied to achieve this objective. A key step in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-03 Pangpang Liu , Chengchun Shi , Will Wei Sun

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) has become a cornerstone for aligning large language models with human preferences. However, the heterogeneity of human feedback, driven by diverse individual contexts and preferences, poses…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-05 Seong Jin Lee , Will Wei Sun , Yufeng Liu

While direct policy optimization methods exist, pioneering LLMs are fine-tuned with reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to generate better responses under the supervision of a reward model learned from preference data. One…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Chuheng Zhang , Wei Shen , Li Zhao , Xuyun Zhang , Xiaolong Xu , Wanchun Dou , Jiang Bian

Training language models via reinforcement learning often relies on imperfect proxy rewards, since ground truth rewards that precisely define the intended behavior are rarely available. Standard metrics for assessing the quality of proxy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Shuning Shang , Hubert Strauss , Stanley Wei , Sanjeev Arora , Noam Razin

In this paper, we observe that current models are susceptible to reward hacking, leading to a substantial overestimation of a model's reasoning ability. This is evidenced by a high incidence of false positives-solutions that reach the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Youliang Yuan , Qiuyang Mang , Jingbang Chen , Hong Wan , Xiaoyuan Liu , Junjielong Xu , Jen-tse Huang , Wenxuan Wang , Wenxiang Jiao , Pinjia He

Meta-Black-Box Optimization (MetaBBO) is an emerging avenue within Optimization community, where algorithm design policy could be meta-learned by reinforcement learning to enhance optimization performance. So far, the reward functions in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Zechuan Huang , Zhiguang Cao , Hongshu Guo , Yue-Jiao Gong , Zeyuan Ma

Human-designed reward functions for reinforcement learning (RL) agents are frequently misaligned with the humans' true, unobservable objectives, and thus act only as proxies. Optimizing for a misspecified proxy reward function often induces…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Stephane Hatgis-Kessell , Logan Mondal Bhamidipaty , Emma Brunskill

The success of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) critically depends on the quality of the reward model. However, while this quality is primarily evaluated through accuracy, it remains unclear whether accuracy fully captures…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Noam Razin , Zixuan Wang , Hubert Strauss , Stanley Wei , Jason D. Lee , Sanjeev Arora

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

Reward models are critical for reinforcement learning from human feedback, as they determine the alignment quality and reliability of generative models. For complex tasks such as image editing, reward models are required to capture global…

The correct specification of reward models is a well-known challenge in reinforcement learning. Hand-crafted reward functions often lead to inefficient or suboptimal policies and may not be aligned with user values. Reinforcement learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Muhan Lin , Shuyang Shi , Yue Guo , Behdad Chalaki , Vaishnav Tadiparthi , Ehsan Moradi Pari , Simon Stepputtis , Joseph Campbell , Katia Sycara

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has become a core post-training step for aligning large language models, yet the reward signal used in RLHF is only a learned proxy for true human utility. From an operations research…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Yikai Wang , Shang Liu , Jose Blanchet

The Bradley-Terry (BT) model is widely practiced in reward modeling for reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF). Despite its effectiveness, reward models (RMs) trained with BT model loss are prone to over-optimization, losing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Jiwoo Hong , Noah Lee , Eunki Kim , Guijin Son , Woojin Chung , Aman Gupta , Shao Tang , James Thorne

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has been crucial in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values. Traditionally, RLHF involves generating responses to a query and using a reward model to assign a reward to the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-04 Wenxuan Zhou , Shujian Zhang , Lingxiao Zhao , Tao Meng

Text classification models are typically trained via supervised fine-tuning (SFT). However, SFT essentially performs behavior cloning from instance-wise labels and thus fails to adequately capture relative preference relations among…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Tianxiang Xu , Xiaoyan Zhu , Xin Lai , Jiayin Wang

Reward models are fundamental to Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), yet real-world datasets are inevitably corrupted by noisy preference. Conventional training objectives tend to overfit these errors, while existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Licheng Pan , Haochen Yang , Haoxuan Li , Yunsheng Lu , Yongqi Tong , Yinuo Wang , Shijian Wang , Zhixuan Chu , Lei Shen , Yuan Lu , Hao Wang

Spurious correlations in a reward model's training data can prevent Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) from identifying the desired goal and induce unwanted behaviors. This paper shows that offline RLHF is susceptible to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-16 Xin Chen , Sam Toyer , Florian Shkurti

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a pivotal technique for aligning artificial intelligence systems with human values, achieving remarkable success in fine-tuning large language models. However, existing RLHF…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-26 Renpu Liu , Peng Wang , Donghao Li , Cong Shen , Jing Yang