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The utility of reinforcement learning is limited by the alignment of reward functions with the interests of human stakeholders. One promising method for alignment is to learn the reward function from human-generated preferences between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-08 W. Bradley Knox , Stephane Hatgis-Kessell , Serena Booth , Scott Niekum , Peter Stone , Alessandro Allievi

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 with Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a key paradigm for task-specific fine-tuning of language models using human preference data. While numerous publicly available preference datasets provide pairwise comparisons…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Ashwin Kumar , Yuzi He , Aram H. Markosyan , Bobbie Chern , Imanol Arrieta-Ibarra

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

Rewards serve as proxies for human preferences and play a crucial role in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). However, if these rewards are inherently imperfect, exhibiting various biases, they can adversely affect the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Sheng Ouyang , Yulan Hu , Ge Chen , Qingyang Li , Fuzheng Zhang , Yong Liu

Reinforcement learning (RL) systems typically optimize scalar reward functions that assume precise and reliable evaluation of outcomes. However, real-world objectives--especially those derived from human preferences--are often uncertain,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Disha Singha

Learning a reward function from human preferences is challenging as it typically requires having a high-fidelity simulator or using expensive and potentially unsafe actual physical rollouts in the environment. However, in many tasks the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-18 Daniel Shin , Daniel S. Brown , Anca D. Dragan

Sample efficiency is critical for online Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). While existing works investigate sample-efficient online exploration strategies, the potential of utilizing misspecified yet relevant reward models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Jiawei Huang , Bingcong Li , Christoph Dann , Niao He

The effectiveness of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in continuous control robotics tasks is mainly dependent on the design of the underlying reward function, which is highly prone to reward hacking. A misalignment between the reward…

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has enabled significant advancements within language modeling for powerful, instruction-following models. However, the alignment of these models remains a pressing challenge as the policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Ahmed M. Ahmed , Rafael Rafailov , Stepan Sharkov , Xuechen Li , Sanmi Koyejo

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has become a pivotal paradigm in artificial intelligence to align large models with human preferences. In this paper, we propose a novel statistical framework to simultaneously conduct the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-01 Nan Lu , Ethan Lee , Ethan X. Fang , Junwei Lu

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has shown great potential in fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) to align with human preferences. Existing methods perform preference alignment from a fixed dataset, which can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Chenjia Bai , Yang Zhang , Shuang Qiu , Qiaosheng Zhang , Kang Xu , Xuelong Li

Existing algorithms for reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) can incentivize responses at odds with preferences because they are based on models that assume independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA). The perverse incentives…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-02 Wanqiao Xu , Shi Dong , Xiuyuan Lu , Grace Lam , Zheng Wen , Benjamin Van Roy

Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) and Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) are the main RL paradigms used in LLM post-training, each offering distinct advantages. However, RLHF struggles with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Zhilin Wang , Jiaqi Zeng , Olivier Delalleau , Ellie Evans , Daniel Egert , Hoo-Chang Shin , Felipe Soares , Yi Dong , Oleksii Kuchaiev

We present the workflow of Online Iterative Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) in this technical report, which is widely reported to outperform its offline counterpart by a large margin in the recent large language model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-13 Hanze Dong , Wei Xiong , Bo Pang , Haoxiang Wang , Han Zhao , Yingbo Zhou , Nan Jiang , Doyen Sahoo , Caiming Xiong , Tong Zhang

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

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a pivotal technique for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences, yet it is susceptible to reward overoptimization, in which policy models overfit to the reward model,…

Conveying complex objectives to reinforcement learning (RL) agents often requires meticulous reward engineering. Preference-based RL methods are able to learn a more flexible reward model based on human preferences by actively incorporating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-26 Xinran Liang , Katherine Shu , Kimin Lee , Pieter Abbeel

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

State-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) have become indispensable tools for various tasks. However, training LLMs to serve as effective assistants for humans requires careful consideration. A promising approach is reinforcement…