English
Related papers

Related papers: Reward Model Learning vs. Direct Policy Optimizati…

200 papers

Margin-based optimization is fundamental to improving generalization and robustness in classification tasks. In the context of reward model learning from preferences within Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), existing methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Yaswanth Chittepu , Prasann Singhal , Greg Durrett , Scott Niekum

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a pivotal tool for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), one of the most popular approaches, formulates RLHF as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Jiafan He , Huizhuo Yuan , Quanquan Gu

The class of direct preference optimization (DPO) algorithms has emerged as a promising approach for solving the alignment problem in foundation models. These algorithms work with very limited feedback in the form of pairwise preferences…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Luca Viano , Ruida Zhou , Yifan Sun , Mahdi Namazifar , Volkan Cevher , Shoham Sabach , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values and intentions is crucial for their utility, honesty, and safety. Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a popular approach to achieve this alignment, but it faces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Junkang Wu , Xue Wang , Zhengyi Yang , Jiancan Wu , Jinyang Gao , Bolin Ding , Xiang Wang , Xiangnan He

This paper studies the alignment process of generative models with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). We first identify the primary challenges of existing popular methods like offline PPO and offline DPO as lacking in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-02 Wei Xiong , Hanze Dong , Chenlu Ye , Ziqi Wang , Han Zhong , Heng Ji , Nan Jiang , Tong Zhang

Aligning large language models (LLM) with human preference plays a key role in building modern generative models and can be achieved by reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Despite their superior performance, current RLHF…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-12 Kaixuan Ji , Jiafan He , Quanquan Gu

Normative theories allow one to elicit key parts of a ML algorithm from first principles, which is crucial at a time of championed scrutiny for ML work. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) cleverly bypasses reward modeling by making an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Wenxuan Zhou , Shujian Zhang , Brice Magdalou , John Lambert , Ehsan Amid , Richard Nock , Andrew Hard

Recently, there has been significant interest in replacing the reward model in Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) methods for Large Language Models (LLMs), such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and its variants. These…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-27 Jian Li , Haojing Huang , Yujia Zhang , Pengfei Xu , Xi Chen , Rui Song , Lida Shi , Jingwen Wang , Hao Xu

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) plays a crucial role in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values and preferences. However, the quality and stability of the trained reward model largely determine the final…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-17 Chunjin Jian , Xinhua Zhu

Aligning generative models with human preference via RLHF typically suffers from overoptimization, where an imperfectly learned reward model can misguide the generative model to output undesired responses. We investigate this problem in a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-05 Zhihan Liu , Miao Lu , Shenao Zhang , Boyi Liu , Hongyi Guo , Yingxiang Yang , Jose Blanchet , Zhaoran Wang

Aligning human preference and value is an important requirement for building contemporary foundation models and embodied AI. However, popular approaches such as reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) break down the task into…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Chenliang Li , Siliang Zeng , Zeyi Liao , Jiaxiang Li , Dongyeop Kang , Alfredo Garcia , Mingyi Hong

As large language models (LLMs) become more capable, fine-tuning techniques for aligning with human intent are increasingly important. A key consideration for aligning these models is how to most effectively use human resources, or model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-01 William Muldrew , Peter Hayes , Mingtian Zhang , David Barber

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has demonstrated great promise in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preference. Depending on the availability of preference data, both online and offline RLHF are active areas…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-20 Shicong Cen , Jincheng Mei , Katayoon Goshvadi , Hanjun Dai , Tong Yang , Sherry Yang , Dale Schuurmans , Yuejie Chi , Bo Dai

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences has become essential for safe and beneficial AI deployment. While Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) established the dominant paradigm, a proliferation of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Tarun Raheja , Nilay Pochhi

This paper studies post-training large language models (LLMs) using preference feedback from a powerful oracle to help a model iteratively improve over itself. The typical approach for post-training LLMs involves Reinforcement Learning from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-08 Corby Rosset , Ching-An Cheng , Arindam Mitra , Michael Santacroce , Ahmed Awadallah , Tengyang Xie

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has been proposed as a promising alternative to Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) based Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF). However, empirical evaluations consistently reveal suboptimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Qinwei Ma , Jingzhe Shi , Can Jin , Jenq-Neng Hwang , Serge Belongie , Lei Li

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

The ability to train high-performing reward models with few-shot data is critical for enhancing the efficiency and scalability of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). We propose a data augmentation and expansion framework that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Yiyang Zhao , Huiyu Bai , Xuejiao Zhao

Preference-based reinforcement learning (RL) is a key paradigm for aligning policies with human judgments, yet its theoretical behavior in distributed settings where preference data are fragmented across heterogeneous users remains poorly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Zhanhong Jiang