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This work tackles the problem of overoptimization in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), a prevalent technique for aligning models with human preferences. RLHF relies on reward or preference models trained on \emph{fixed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Dhawal Gupta , Adam Fisch , Christoph Dann , Alekh Agarwal

Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) is a widely used fine-tuning approach that aligns machine learning model, particularly Language Model (LM) with human preferences. There are typically multiple objectives driving the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Nuoya Xiong , Aarti Singh

Reinforcement learning (RL) requires skillful definition and remarkable computational efforts to solve optimization and control problems, which could impair its prospect. Introducing human guidance into reinforcement learning is a promising…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-30 Jingda Wu , Zhiyu Huang , Wenhui Huang , Chen Lv

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (\textbf{RLHF}) has emerged as a dominant approach for aligning LLM outputs with human preferences. Inspired by the success of RLHF, we study the performance of multiple algorithms that learn from…

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

Learning from human preferences is a cornerstone of aligning machine learning models with subjective human judgments. Yet, collecting such preference data is often costly and time-consuming, motivating the need for more efficient learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-07 Matteo Cercola , Valeria Capretti , Simone Formentin

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a important paradigm for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences during post-training. This framework typically involves two stages: first, training a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Wenyuan Xu , Xiaochen Zuo , Chao Xin , Yu Yue , Lin Yan , Yonghui Wu

Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) provides a way to learn high-performance policies in environments where the reward signal is hard to specify, avoiding heuristic and time-consuming reward design. However, PbRL can suffer from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-02 Chenyang Cao , Miguel Rogel-García , Mohamed Nabail , Xueqian Wang , Nicholas Rhinehart

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

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

RLHF has emerged as a predominant approach for aligning artificial intelligence systems with human preferences, demonstrating exceptional and measurable efficacy in instruction following tasks; however, it exhibits insufficient compliance…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Ruopei Sun , Jianfeng Cai , Jinhua Zhu , Kangwen Zhao , Dongyun Xue , Wengang Zhou , Li Li , Houqiang Li

Designing a reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) algorithm to approximate a human's unobservable reward function requires assuming, implicitly or explicitly, a model of human preferences. A preference model that poorly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Stephane Hatgis-Kessell , W. Bradley Knox , Serena Booth , Peter Stone

We apply preference modeling and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to finetune language models to act as helpful and harmless assistants. We find this alignment training improves performance on almost all NLP evaluations,…

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) replaces hard-to-specify rewards with pairwise trajectory preferences, yet regret-oriented theory often assumes that preference labels are generated consistently from a single ground-truth…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Ming Shi , Yingbin Liang , Ness B. Shroff , Ananthram Swami

This paper focuses on reinforcement learning (RL) with limited prior knowledge. In the domain of swarm robotics for instance, the expert can hardly design a reward function or demonstrate the target behavior, forbidding the use of both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-08-07 Riad Akrour , Marc Schoenauer , Michèle Sebag

We consider algorithms for learning reward functions from human preferences over pairs of trajectory segments, as used in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Most recent work assumes that human preferences are generated based…

Preference based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) removes the need to hand specify a reward function by learning a reward from preference feedback over policy behaviors. Current approaches to PbRL do not address the credit assignment problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Mudit Verma , Katherine Metcalf

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has become a key factor in aligning model behavior with users' goals. However, while humans integrate multiple strategies when making decisions, current RLHF approaches often simplify this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Mingkang Wu , Devin White , Evelyn Rose , Vernon Lawhern , Nicholas R Waytowich , Yongcan Cao

With the development of large language models (LLMs), striking a balance between the performance and safety of AI systems has never been more critical. However, the inherent tension between the objectives of helpfulness and harmlessness…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-10-20 Josef Dai , Xuehai Pan , Ruiyang Sun , Jiaming Ji , Xinbo Xu , Mickel Liu , Yizhou Wang , Yaodong Yang

Risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) aims to optimize policies that balance the expected reward and risk. In this paper, we present a novel risk-sensitive RL framework that employs an Iterated Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-05 Yu Chen , Yihan Du , Pihe Hu , Siwei Wang , Desheng Wu , Longbo Huang