Related papers: Catastrophic Goodhart: regularizing RLHF with KL d…
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…
Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has become an important technical and storytelling tool to deploy the latest machine learning systems. In this book, we hope to give a gentle introduction to the core methods for people with…
As a distributed learning paradigm, Federated Learning (FL) faces the communication bottleneck issue due to many rounds of model synchronization and aggregation. Heterogeneous data further deteriorates the situation by causing slow…
In reinforcement learning, if the agent's reward differs from the designers' true utility, even only rarely, the state distribution resulting from the agent's policy can be very bad, in theory and in practice. When RL policies would devolve…
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…
Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has been an effective technique for aligning AI systems with human values, with remarkable successes in fine-tuning large-language models recently. Most existing RLHF paradigms make the…
Because human preferences are too complex to codify, AIs operate with misspecified objectives. Optimizing such objectives often produces undesirable outcomes; this phenomenon is known as reward hacking. Such outcomes are not necessarily…
A central belief in scaling reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards for instruction following (IF) tasks is that, a diverse mixture of verifiable hard and unverifiable soft constraints is essential for generalizing to unseen…
A common and effective strategy for humans to improve an unsatisfactory outcome in daily life is to find a cause of this outcome and correct the cause. In this paper, we investigate whether this human improvement strategy can be applied to…
Reinforcement learning (RL) plays a crucial role in shaping the behavior of large language and reasoning models (LLMs/LRMs). However, it often produces brittle and unstable policies, leading to critical failures such as spurious reasoning,…
Large Multimodal Models (LMM) are built across modalities and the misalignment between two modalities can result in "hallucination", generating textual outputs that are not grounded by the multimodal information in context. To address the…
Designing reward functions for efficiently guiding reinforcement learning (RL) agents toward specific behaviors is a complex task. This is challenging since it requires the identification of reward structures that are not sparse and that…
Classical information-theoretic generalization bounds typically control the generalization gap through KL-based mutual information and therefore rely on boundedness or sub-Gaussian tails via the moment generating function (MGF). In many…
Unraveling the reasons behind the remarkable success and exceptional generalization capabilities of deep neural networks presents a formidable challenge. Recent insights from random matrix theory, specifically those concerning the spectral…
Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has become an essential step in fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) to align them with human preferences. However, human labelers are selfish and have diverse preferences. They may…
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…
Reward models (RMs) play a crucial role in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), aligning model behavior with human preferences. However, existing benchmarks for reward models show a weak correlation with the performance of…
While recent advances have boosted LM proficiency in linguistic benchmarks, LMs consistently struggle to reason correctly on complex tasks like mathematics. We turn to Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) as a method with which…
Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has become a powerful post-training paradigm for aligning large language models with human preferences. A core challenge in RLHF is constructing accurate reward signals, where the…
Reward hacking--where agents exploit flaws in imperfect reward functions rather than performing tasks as intended--poses risks for AI alignment. Reward hacking has been observed in real training runs, with coding agents learning to…