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In reinforcement learning from human feedback, it is common to optimize against a reward model trained to predict human preferences. Because the reward model is an imperfect proxy, optimizing its value too much can hinder ground truth…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-20 Leo Gao , John Schulman , Jacob Hilton

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

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a widely used method for aligning large language models with human preferences. However, RLHF often suffers from reward model overoptimisation, in which models overfit to the reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Lorenz Wolf , Robert Kirk , Mirco Musolesi

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 typically assume rewards to be sampled from light-tailed distributions, such as Gaussian or bounded. However, a wide variety of real-world systems generate rewards that follow heavy-tailed distributions. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-26 Vincent Zhuang , Yanan Sui

We show that when large language models learn to reward hack on production RL environments, this can result in egregious emergent misalignment. We start with a pretrained model, impart knowledge of reward hacking strategies via synthetic…

How can we make models robust to even imperfect human feedback? In reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), human preferences over model outputs are used to train a reward model that assigns scalar values to responses. Because…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Tiffany Horter , Andrew Markham , Niki Trigoni , Serena Booth

Re-inforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has been effective in the task of AI alignment. However, one of the key assumptions of RLHF is that the annotators (referred to as workers from here on out) have a homogeneous response…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Sarvesh Shashidhar , Abhishek Mishra , Madhav Kotecha

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is the standard method to align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences. In this work, we introduce alignment tampering, a potential vulnerability where the LLM undergoing…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Dongyoon Hahm , Dylan Hadfield-Menell , Kimin Lee

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a popular paradigm for aligning models with human intent. Typically RLHF algorithms operate in two phases: first, use human preferences to learn a reward function and second,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-01 Joey Hejna , Rafael Rafailov , Harshit Sikchi , Chelsea Finn , Scott Niekum , W. Bradley Knox , Dorsa Sadigh

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback significantly enhances Natural Language Processing by aligning language models with human expectations. A critical factor in this alignment is the strength of reward models used during training.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-17 Yanjun Chen , Dawei Zhu , Yirong Sun , Xinghao Chen , Wei Zhang , Xiaoyu Shen

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a key technique for post-training large language models. Despite its empirical success, the theoretical understanding of RLHF is still limited, as learning the KL-regularized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Di Wu , Chengshuai Shi , Jing Yang , Cong Shen

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has become a core post-training step for aligning large language models, yet the reward signal used in RLHF is only a learned proxy for true human utility. From an operations research…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Yikai Wang , Shang Liu , Jose Blanchet

We study Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) in settings where multiple labelers may strategically misreport feedback to steer the learned policy toward their own preferences. We show that existing RLHF algorithms, including…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Thomas Kleine Buening , Jiarui Gan , Debmalya Mandal , Marta Kwiatkowska

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) aligns large language models (LLMs) by encouraging their generations to have high rewards, using a reward model trained on human preferences. To prevent the forgetting of pre-trained…

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

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) provides a principled framework for aligning AI systems with human preference data. For various reasons, e.g., personal bias, context ambiguity, lack of training, etc, human annotators may…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-10 Alexander Bukharin , Ilgee Hong , Haoming Jiang , Zichong Li , Qingru Zhang , Zixuan Zhang , Tuo Zhao

Language models (LMs) often exhibit undesirable text generation behaviors, including generating false, toxic, or irrelevant outputs. Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) - where human preference judgments on LM outputs are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Zeqiu Wu , Yushi Hu , Weijia Shi , Nouha Dziri , Alane Suhr , Prithviraj Ammanabrolu , Noah A. Smith , Mari Ostendorf , Hannaneh Hajishirzi

In reinforcement learning, specifying reward functions that capture the intended task can be very challenging. Reward learning aims to address this issue by learning the reward function. However, a learned reward model may have a low error…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-09 Lukas Fluri , Leon Lang , Alessandro Abate , Patrick Forré , David Krueger , Joar Skalse

It is commonly believed that optimizing the reverse KL divergence results in "mode seeking", while optimizing forward KL results in "mass covering", with the latter being preferred if the goal is to sample from multiple diverse modes. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Anthony GX-Chen , Jatin Prakash , Jeff Guo , Rob Fergus , Rajesh Ranganath