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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

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a standard approach for fine-tuning large language models to follow instructions. As part of this process, learned reward models are used to approximately model human preferences.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Thomas Coste , Usman Anwar , Robert Kirk , David Krueger

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has proven effective in aligning large language models with human intentions, yet it often relies on complex methodologies like Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) that require extensive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-30 Han Xia , Songyang Gao , Qiming Ge , Zhiheng Xi , Qi Zhang , Xuanjing Huang

While Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is widely used to align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences, it typically assumes homogeneous preferences across users, overlooking diverse human values and minority…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Yijiang River Dong , Tiancheng Hu , Yinhong Liu , Ahmet Üstün , Nigel Collier

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has been commonly used to align the behaviors of Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences. Recently, a popular alternative is Direct Policy Optimization (DPO), which replaces an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-03 Runsheng Yu , Yong Wang , Xiaoqi Jiao , Youzhi Zhang , James T. Kwok

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has played a crucial role in the success of large models such as ChatGPT. RLHF is a reinforcement learning framework which combines human feedback to improve learning effectiveness and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-28 Feiyang Han , Yimin Wei , Zhaofeng Liu , Yanxing Qi

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has become a popular approach to align language models (LMs) with human preferences. This method involves collecting a large dataset of human pairwise preferences across various text…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Antoine Scheid , Etienne Boursier , Alain Durmus , Michael I. Jordan , Pierre Ménard , Eric Moulines , Michal Valko

Recent progress in strengthening the capabilities of large language models has stemmed from applying reinforcement learning to domains with automatically verifiable outcomes. A key question is whether we can similarly use RL to optimize for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Eric Zhao , Jessica Dai , Pranjal Awasthi

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has proven effective in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences, but often at the cost of reduced output diversity. This trade-off between diversity and alignment…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Haoran Sun , Yekun Chai , Shuohuan Wang , Yu Sun , Hua Wu , Haifeng Wang

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) leverages a Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence loss to stabilize training and prevent overfitting. However, in methods such as GRPO, its implementation may be guided by principles from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Kezhao Liu , Jason Klein Liu , Mingtao Chen , Yiming Liu

Reinforcement learning algorithms are fundamental to align large language models with human preferences and to enhance their reasoning capabilities. However, current reinforcement learning algorithms often suffer from training instability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Yaru Hao , Li Dong , Xun Wu , Shaohan Huang , Zewen Chi , Furu Wei

In this paper, we study the offline and online settings of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) with KL-regularization -- a widely used objective function in large language model alignment -- under the $\epsilon$ local…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Yulian Wu , Rushil Thareja , Praneeth Vepakomma , Francesco Orabona

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a pivotal technique that aligns language models closely with human-centric values. The initial phase of RLHF involves learning human values using a reward model from ranking data. It is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-30 Banghua Zhu , Michael I. Jordan , Jiantao Jiao

In this paper, we investigate preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL), which enables reinforcement learning (RL) agents to learn from human feedback. This is particularly valuable when defining a fine-grain reward function is not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Guojian Wang , Jianxiang Liu , Xinyuan Li , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Tianyuan Chen , Xuyang Chen

Preference-based feedback is important for many applications in machine learning where evaluation of a reward function is not feasible. Notable recent examples arise in preference alignment for large language models, including in…

We study the problem of deployment efficient reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation under the \emph{reward-free} exploration setting. This is a well-motivated problem because deploying new policies is costly in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-23 Dan Qiao , Yu-Xiang Wang

Existing alignment methods share a common topology of information flow, where reward information is collected from humans, modeled with preference learning, and used to tune language models. However, this shared topology has not been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Tianyi Qiu , Fanzhi Zeng , Jiaming Ji , Dong Yan , Kaile Wang , Jiayi Zhou , Yang Han , Josef Dai , Xuehai Pan , Yaodong Yang

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a key method for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, current offline alignment approaches like DPO, IPO, and SLiC rely heavily on fixed preference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Mucong Ding , Souradip Chakraborty , Vibhu Agrawal , Zora Che , Alec Koppel , Mengdi Wang , Amrit Bedi , Furong Huang

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a popular alternative to Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), offering theoretical equivalence with simpler implementation. We prove this equivalence is conditional rather…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Zhiqin Yang , Yonggang Zhang , Wei Xue , Dong Fang , Bo Han , Yike Guo

Alignment via reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has become the dominant paradigm for controlling the quality of outputs from large language models (LLMs). However, existing theories do not provide strong justification for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Jihun Yun , Juno Kim , Jongho Park , Junhyuck Kim , Jongha Jon Ryu , Jaewoong Cho , Kwang-Sung Jun