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Related papers: Optimal Design for Reward Modeling in RLHF

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Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is widely used to align large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, RLHF-trained reward models often exhibit length bias -- a systematic tendency to favor longer responses…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Hyeonji Kim , Sujeong Oh , Sanghack Lee

Reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) is an emerging paradigm to align models with human preferences. Typically, RLHF aggregates preferences from multiple individuals who have diverse viewpoints that may conflict with each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-11 Huiying Zhong , Zhun Deng , Weijie J. Su , Zhiwei Steven Wu , Linjun Zhang

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) emerges as a promising paradigm for aligning large language models (LLMs). However, a notable challenge in RLHF is overoptimization, where beyond a certain threshold, the pursuit of higher…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-02 Yuanzhao Zhai , Han Zhang , Yu Lei , Yue Yu , Kele Xu , Dawei Feng , Bo Ding , Huaimin Wang

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has demonstrated effectiveness in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, token-level RLHF suffers from the credit assignment problem over long sequences,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Yekun Chai , Haoran Sun , Huang Fang , Shuohuan Wang , Yu Sun , Hua Wu

In this work, we study the issue of reward hacking on the response length, a challenge emerging in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) on LLMs. A well-formatted, verbose but less helpful response from the LLMs can often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Lichang Chen , Chen Zhu , Davit Soselia , Jiuhai Chen , Tianyi Zhou , Tom Goldstein , Heng Huang , Mohammad Shoeybi , Bryan Catanzaro

We consider the problem of fitting a reinforcement learning (RL) model to some given behavioral data under a multi-armed bandit environment. These models have received much attention in recent years for characterizing human and animal…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2026-03-27 Hao Zhu , Jasper Hoffmann , Baohe Zhang , Joschka Boedecker

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 from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a crucial technique for aligning language models with human preferences, playing a pivotal role in the success of conversational models like GPT-4, ChatGPT, and Llama 2. A core challenge…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Chenghua Huang , Zhizhen Fan , Lu Wang , Fangkai Yang , Pu Zhao , Zeqi Lin , Qingwei Lin , Dongmei Zhang , Saravan Rajmohan , Qi Zhang

While large-scale unsupervised language models (LMs) learn broad world knowledge and some reasoning skills, achieving precise control of their behavior is difficult due to the completely unsupervised nature of their training. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-31 Rafael Rafailov , Archit Sharma , Eric Mitchell , Stefano Ermon , Christopher D. Manning , Chelsea Finn

Learning from human feedback has shown success in aligning large, pretrained models with human values. Prior works have mostly focused on learning from high-level labels, such as preferences between pairs of model outputs. On the other…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Amber Xie , Chin-Yi Cheng , Forrest Huang , Yang Li

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

In multi-objective decision-making with hierarchical preferences, lexicographic bandits provide a natural framework for optimizing multiple objectives in a prioritized order. In this setting, a learner repeatedly selects arms and observes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Bo Xue , Yuanyu Wan , Zhichao Lu , Qingfu Zhang

This paper addresses the cost-efficiency aspect of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). RLHF leverages datasets of human preferences over outputs of large language models (LLM)s to instill human expectations into LLMs.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-13 Guoxi Zhang , Jiuding Duan

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) is currently the most widely used method to align large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. Existing RLHF methods can be roughly categorized as either reward-based or reward-free.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-11 Shusheng Xu , Wei Fu , Jiaxuan Gao , Wenjie Ye , Weilin Liu , Zhiyu Mei , Guangju Wang , Chao Yu , Yi Wu

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

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences is crucial for enhancing their utility in terms of helpfulness, truthfulness, safety, harmlessness, and interestingness. Existing methods for achieving this alignment often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-04 Wenhao Liu , Xiaohua Wang , Muling Wu , Tianlong Li , Changze Lv , Zixuan Ling , Jianhao Zhu , Cenyuan Zhang , Xiaoqing Zheng , Xuanjing Huang

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

Recent advances in machine learning have shown that Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) can improve machine learning models and align them with human preferences. Although very successful for Large Language Models (LLMs),…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Katie Z Luo , Zhenzhen Liu , Xiangyu Chen , Yurong You , Sagie Benaim , Cheng Perng Phoo , Mark Campbell , Wen Sun , Bharath Hariharan , Kilian Q. Weinberger

In many real-world applications, it is hard to provide a reward signal in each step of a Reinforcement Learning (RL) process and more natural to give feedback when an episode ends. To this end, we study the recently proposed model of RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-15 Asaf Cassel , Haipeng Luo , Aviv Rosenberg , Dmitry Sotnikov