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Preference learning is a key technology for aligning language models with human values. Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a model-based algorithm to optimize preference learning, which first fits a reward model for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-26 Zaifan Jiang , Xing Huang , Chao Wei

We apply preference modeling and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to finetune language models to act as helpful and harmless assistants. We find this alignment training improves performance on almost all NLP evaluations,…

Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) enhances the alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, its limitations have led to the development of Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), an RL-free approach designed to overcome…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Amir Saeidi , Shivanshu Verma , Aswin RRV , Kashif Rasul , Chitta Baral

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a central framework for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. Despite its practical success, RLHF raises fundamental statistical questions because it…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-06 Pangpang Liu , Chengchun Shi , Will Wei Sun

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized artificial intelligence with capabilities in reasoning, coding, and communication, driving innovation across industries. Their true potential depends on effective alignment to ensure correct,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Bowen Jin , Jinsung Yoon , Zhen Qin , Ziqi Wang , Wei Xiong , Yu Meng , Jiawei Han , Sercan O. Arik

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has been positioned by recent literature as the canonical method for the RL part of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). PPO performs well empirically but has a heuristic motivation and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Dipan Maity

To design rewards that align with human goals, Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a prominent technique for learning reward functions from human preferences and optimizing policies via reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Taehyun Cho , Seokhun Ju , Seungyub Han , Dohyeong Kim , Kyungjae Lee , Jungwoo Lee

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO)-based reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a widely adopted paradigm for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, its training pipeline suffers from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Kaizhuo Yan , Yingjie Yu , Yifan Yu , Haizhong Zheng , Fan Lai

In this article, we primarily examine a variety of RL-based and RL-free methods designed to address Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and Large Reasoning Models (LRMs). We begin with a concise overview of the typical steps…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-27 Xin Cai

The increasing capabilities of large language models (LLMs) raise opportunities for artificial general intelligence but concurrently amplify safety concerns, such as potential misuse of AI systems, necessitating effective AI alignment.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-29 Chaoqi Wang , Yibo Jiang , Chenghao Yang , Han Liu , Yuxin Chen

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences is crucial for enhancing their utility in terms of helpfulness, truthfulness, safety, harmlessness, and interestingness. Existing methods for achieving this alignment often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-04 Wenhao Liu , Xiaohua Wang , Muling Wu , Tianlong Li , Changze Lv , Zixuan Ling , Jianhao Zhu , Cenyuan Zhang , Xiaoqing Zheng , Xuanjing Huang

This work tackles the problem of overoptimization in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), a prevalent technique for aligning models with human preferences. RLHF relies on reward or preference models trained on \emph{fixed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Dhawal Gupta , Adam Fisch , Christoph Dann , Alekh Agarwal

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

Rerankers play a pivotal role in refining retrieval results for Retrieval-Augmented Generation. However, current reranking models are typically optimized on static human annotated relevance labels in isolation, decoupled from the downstream…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Yuhang Wu , Xiangqing Shen , Fanfan Wang , Cangqi Zhou , Zhen Wu , Xinyu Dai , Rui Xia

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has achieved impressive empirical successes while relying on a small amount of human feedback. However, there is limited theoretical justification for this phenomenon. Additionally, most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Yihan Du , Anna Winnicki , Gal Dalal , Shie Mannor , R. Srikant

The alignment of large language models (LLMs) with human preferences is commonly achieved through Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) simplified this paradigm by establishing a direct…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Yuandong Tan

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a variant of reinforcement learning (RL) that learns from human feedback instead of relying on an engineered reward function. Building on prior work on the related setting of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Timo Kaufmann , Paul Weng , Viktor Bengs , Eyke Hüllermeier

Offline algorithms for Reinforcement Learning from Human Preferences (RLHF), which use only a fixed dataset of sampled responses given an input, and preference feedback among these responses, have gained increasing prominence in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-12 Alekh Agarwal , Christoph Dann , Teodor V. Marinov

Human preference alignment is essential to improve the interaction quality of large language models (LLMs). Existing alignment methods depend on manually annotated preference data to guide the LLM optimization directions. However,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Pengyu Cheng , Yifan Yang , Jian Li , Yong Dai , Tianhao Hu , Peixin Cao , Nan Du , Xiaolong Li