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While numerous works have focused on devising efficient algorithms for reinforcement learning (RL) with uniformly bounded rewards, it remains an open question whether sample or time-efficient algorithms for RL with large state-action space…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-08 Jiayi Huang , Han Zhong , Liwei Wang , Lin F. Yang

Reward models trained on human preference data have demonstrated strong effectiveness in aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human intent under the framework of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). However, RLHF remains…

Reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF), which learns a reward model from human preference data and then optimizes a policy to favor preferred responses, has emerged as a central paradigm for aligning large language models (LLMs)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-29 Gen Li , Yuling Yan

A key challenge in training Large Language Models (LLMs) is properly aligning them with human preferences. Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) uses pairwise comparisons from human annotators to train reward functions and has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-17 Ariel D. Procaccia , Benjamin Schiffer , Shirley Zhang

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has been credited as the key advance that has allowed Large Language Models (LLMs) to effectively follow instructions and produce useful assistance. Classically, this involves generating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-02 Alex J. Chan , Hao Sun , Samuel Holt , Mihaela van der Schaar

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for downstream tasks typically exhibit a fundamental safety-capability tradeoff, where improving task performance degrades safety alignment even on benign datasets. This degradation persists across…

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has greatly improved the performance of modern Large Language Models (LLMs). The RLHF process is resource-intensive and technically challenging, generally requiring a large collection of…

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

Language models trained with reinforcement learning (RL) can engage in reward hacking--the exploitation of unintended strategies for high reward--without revealing this behavior in their chain-of-thought reasoning. This makes the detection…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Miles Turpin , Andy Arditi , Marvin Li , Joe Benton , Julian Michael

Safe Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (Safe RLHF) has recently achieved empirical success in developing helpful and harmless large language models by decoupling human preferences regarding helpfulness and harmlessness. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Qiang Liu , Adrienne Kline , Ermin Wei

Campbell-Goodhart's law relates to the causal inference error whereby decision-making agents aim to influence variables which are correlated to their goal objective but do not reliably cause it. This is a well known error in Economics and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-19 Hal Ashton

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a powerful technique for training agents to perform difficult-to-specify tasks. However, human feedback can be noisy, particularly when human teachers lack relevant knowledge or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Oliver Daniels-Koch , Rachel Freedman

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as the main paradigm for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. Typically, RLHF involves the initial step of learning a reward model from human feedback,…

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) to align with user preferences is challenging due to the high cost of quality human annotations in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and the generalizability limitations of AI…

Existing approaches to language model alignment often treat safety as a tradeoff against helpfulness, which can lead to unacceptable responses in sensitive domains. To ensure reliable performance in such settings, we propose High-Confidence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Yaswanth Chittepu , Blossom Metevier , Will Schwarzer , Austin Hoag , Scott Niekum , Philip S. Thomas

Widely used alignment techniques, such as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), rely on the ability of humans to supervise model behavior - for example, to evaluate whether a model faithfully followed instructions or generated…

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a technique for training AI systems to align with human goals. RLHF has emerged as the central method used to finetune state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs). Despite this…

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has proven effective in aligning large language models with human preferences, inspiring the development of reward-centric diffusion reinforcement learning (RDRL) to achieve similar…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Kwanyoung Kim , Byeongsu Sim

In this paper, we study the offline and online settings of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) with KL-regularization -- a widely used objective function in large language model alignment -- under the $\epsilon$ local…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Yulian Wu , Rushil Thareja , Praneeth Vepakomma , Francesco Orabona

The success of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) in language model alignment is critically dependent on the capability of the reward model (RM). However, as the training process progresses, the output distribution of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-02 Shihan Dou , Yan Liu , Enyu Zhou , Tianlong Li , Haoxiang Jia , Limao Xiong , Xin Zhao , Junjie Ye , Rui Zheng , Tao Gui , Qi Zhang , Xuanjing Huang