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Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a recent technique to improve the quality of the text generated by a language model, making it closer to what humans would generate. A core ingredient in RLHF's success in aligning and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-08 Miguel Moura Ramos , Patrick Fernandes , António Farinhas , André F. T. Martins

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is commonly employed to tailor models to human preferences, especially to improve the safety of outputs from large language models (LLMs). Traditionally, this method depends on selecting…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-29 Xiaomin Li , Mingye Gao , Zhiwei Zhang , Jingxuan Fan , Weiyu Li

The prevalent deployment of learning from human preferences through reinforcement learning (RLHF) relies on two important approximations: the first assumes that pairwise preferences can be substituted with pointwise rewards. The second…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-11-23 Mohammad Gheshlaghi Azar , Mark Rowland , Bilal Piot , Daniel Guo , Daniele Calandriello , Michal Valko , Rémi Munos

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…

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

Large language models often exhibit increased sycophantic behavior after preference-based post-training, showing a stronger tendency to affirm a user's stated or implied belief even when this conflicts with factual accuracy or sound…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Itai Shapira , Gerdus Benade , Ariel D. Procaccia

Past analyses of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) assume that the human evaluators fully observe the environment. What happens when human feedback is based only on partial observations? We formally define two failure cases:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Leon Lang , Davis Foote , Stuart Russell , Anca Dragan , Erik Jenner , Scott Emmons

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a powerful approach for aligning generative models, but its reliance on learned reward models makes it vulnerable to mis-specification and reward hacking. Preference-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Akhil Agnihotri , Rahul Jain , Deepak Ramachandran , Zheng Wen

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) allows us to train models, such as language models (LMs), to follow complex human preferences. In RLHF for LMs, we first train an LM using supervised fine-tuning, sample pairs of responses,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Johannes Ackermann , Takashi Ishida , Masashi Sugiyama

Accurately aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences is crucial for informing fair, economically sound, and statistically efficient decision-making processes. However, we argue that the predominant approach for aligning…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-08-26 Jiancong Xiao , Ziniu Li , Xingyu Xie , Emily Getzen , Cong Fang , Qi Long , Weijie J. Su

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a important paradigm for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences during post-training. This framework typically involves two stages: first, training a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Wenyuan Xu , Xiaochen Zuo , Chao Xin , Yu Yue , Lin Yan , Yonghui Wu

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human intentions has become a critical task for safely deploying models in real-world systems. While existing alignment approaches have seen empirical success, theoretically understanding how these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-08 Shawn Im , Yixuan Li

As large language models increasingly drive real-world applications, aligning them with human values becomes paramount. Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a key technique, translating preference data into…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-07 Yunzhen Feng , Ariel Kwiatkowski , Kunhao Zheng , Julia Kempe , Yaqi Duan

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a crucial technique in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences, ensuring these LLMs behave in beneficial and comprehensible ways to users. However, a longstanding…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-03-27 Feiteng Fang , Liang Zhu , Min Yang , Xi Feng , Jinchang Hou , Qixuan Zhao , Chengming Li , Xiping Hu , Ruifeng Xu

Reinforcement Learning algorithms that learn from human feedback (RLHF) need to be efficient in terms of statistical complexity, computational complexity, and query complexity. In this work, we consider the RLHF setting where the feedback…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-14 Runzhe Wu , Wen Sun

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) effectively aligns Large Language Models (LLMs) with aggregate human preferences but often fails to address the diverse and conflicting needs of individual users. To overcome this issue, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Yinlam Chow , Guy Tennenholtz , Ted Yun , James Harrison , Arthur Gretton , Andre Barreto , Bo Dai

While Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has shown promise in aligning generative AI, we present empirical evidence that it can also cause severe, systematic misalignment. We hypothesize that this stems from evaluator…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Kaiqu Liang , Haimin Hu , Ryan Liu , Thomas L. Griffiths , Jaime Fernández Fisac

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 is a general method for learning in sequential settings, but it can often be difficult to specify a good reward function when the task is complex. In these cases, preference feedback or expert demonstrations can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-20 Jason R Brown , Carl Henrik Ek , Robert D Mullins

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have garnered wide attention and led to successful products such as ChatGPT and GPT-4. Their proficiency in adhering to instructions and delivering harmless, helpful, and honest (3H)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-11 Hao Sun