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Large pre-trained models, such as Bert, GPT, and Wav2Vec, have demonstrated great potential for learning representations that are transferable to a wide variety of downstream tasks . It is difficult to obtain a large quantity of supervised…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-12-23 Neeraj Kumar , Ankur Narang , Brejesh Lall

Language model alignment methods such as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) have led to impressive advances in language model capabilities, but are limited by a widely observed phenomenon known as overoptimization, where the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Audrey Huang , Wenhao Zhan , Tengyang Xie , Jason D. Lee , Wen Sun , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Dylan J. Foster

We study the fundamental and timely problem of learning long sequences in autoregressive modeling and next-token prediction under model misspecification, measured by the joint Kullback--Leibler (KL) divergence. Our goal is to characterize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Yunbei Xu , Yuzhe Yuan , Ruohan Zhan

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has recently enhanced the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), particularly for mathematical problem solving. However, a fundamental limitation remains: as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Wenhao Deng , Long Wei , Chenglei Yu , Tailin Wu

This paper explores the effects of various forms of regularization in the context of language model alignment via self-play. While both reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and direct preference optimization (DPO) require to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-09 Reda Alami , Abdalgader Abubaker , Mastane Achab , Mohamed El Amine Seddik , Salem Lahlou

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a crucial paradigm for unlocking the advanced reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), encompassing frameworks like RLHF and RLAIF. Regardless of the specific optimization algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Rui Zhu , Weiheng Bai , Qiushi Wu , Yang Ren , Haixu Tang , Yuchu Liu

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has shown remarkable success in aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences. Traditional RLHF methods rely on a fixed dataset, which often suffers from limited coverage. To…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Long-Fei Li , Yu-Yang Qian , Peng Zhao , Zhi-Hua Zhou

Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training is crucial for LLM alignment and reasoning, but existing policy-based methods, such as PPO and DPO, can fall short of fixing shortcuts inherited from pre-training. In this work, we introduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Jin Peng Zhou , Kaiwen Wang , Jonathan Chang , Zhaolin Gao , Nathan Kallus , Kilian Q. Weinberger , Kianté Brantley , Wen Sun

Empirical risk minimization, a cornerstone in machine learning, is often hindered by the Optimizer's Curse stemming from discrepancies between the empirical and true data-generating distributions.To address this challenge, the robust…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-20 Haojie Yan , Minglong Zhou , Jiayi Guo

When applying reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), the reward is learned from data and, therefore, always has some error. It is common to mitigate this by regularizing the policy with KL divergence from a base model, with the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-11 Thomas Kwa , Drake Thomas , Adrià Garriga-Alonso

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has contributed to performance improvements in large language models. To tackle its reliance on substantial amounts of human-labeled data, a successful approach is multi-task representation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-06 Ruitao Chen , Liwei Wang

This paper addresses a new interpretation of the traditional optimization method in reinforcement learning (RL) as optimization problems using reverse Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, and derives a new optimization method using forward KL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-25 Taisuke Kobayashi

Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) has become crucial for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human intent. However, existing offline RLHF approaches suffer from overoptimization, where language models degrade by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Sharan Sahu , Martin T. Wells

In this article, we primarily examine a variety of RL-based and RL-free methods designed to address Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and Large Reasoning Models (LRMs). We begin with a concise overview of the typical steps…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-27 Xin Cai

Alignment via reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has become the dominant paradigm for controlling the quality of outputs from large language models (LLMs). However, existing theories do not provide strong justification for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Jihun Yun , Juno Kim , Jongho Park , Junhyuck Kim , Jongha Jon Ryu , Jaewoong Cho , Kwang-Sung Jun

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and its variants have emerged as the dominant approaches for aligning Large Language Models with human intent. While empirically effective, the theoretical generalization properties of these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-26 Zhaochun Li , Mingyang Yi , Yue Wang , Shisheng Cui , Yong Liu

Proximal Policy Optimisation (PPO) is an established and effective policy gradient algorithm used for Language Model Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (LM-RLHF). PPO performs well empirically but has a heuristic motivation and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Jason R Brown , Lennie Wells , Edward James Young , Sergio Bacallado

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has become a cornerstone for aligning large language models with human preferences. However, the heterogeneity of human feedback, driven by diverse individual contexts and preferences, poses…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-05 Seong Jin Lee , Will Wei Sun , Yufeng Liu

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a central framework for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. Despite its practical success, RLHF raises fundamental statistical questions because it…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-06 Pangpang Liu , Chengchun Shi , Will Wei Sun

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have garnered wide attention and led to successful products such as ChatGPT and GPT-4. Their proficiency in adhering to instructions and delivering harmless, helpful, and honest (3H)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-11 Hao Sun