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Large Language Models (LLMs), when used in educational settings without pedagogical fine-tuning, often provide immediate answers rather than guiding students through the problem-solving process. This approach falls short of pedagogically…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Shashank Sonkar , Kangqi Ni , Sapana Chaudhary , Richard G. Baraniuk

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a popular paradigm for aligning models with human intent. Typically RLHF algorithms operate in two phases: first, use human preferences to learn a reward function and second,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-01 Joey Hejna , Rafael Rafailov , Harshit Sikchi , Chelsea Finn , Scott Niekum , W. Bradley Knox , Dorsa Sadigh

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a pivotal technique that aligns language models closely with human-centric values. The initial phase of RLHF involves learning human values using a reward model from ranking data. It is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-30 Banghua Zhu , Michael I. Jordan , Jiantao Jiao

Despite the promise of RLHF in aligning LLMs with human preferences, it often leads to superficial alignment, prioritizing stylistic changes over improving downstream performance of LLMs. Underspecified preferences could obscure directions…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-22 Kyungjae Lee , Dasol Hwang , Sunghyun Park , Youngsoo Jang , Moontae Lee

Large language models (LLMs) can be improved by aligning with human preferences through fine-tuning -- the so-called reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). However, the cost of fine-tuning an LLM is prohibitive for many users.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Ahmad Rashid , Ruotian Wu , Julia Grosse , Agustinus Kristiadi , Pascal Poupart

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated great capabilities in natural language understanding and generation, largely attributed to the intricate alignment process using human feedback. While alignment has become an essential training…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-04 Bocheng Chen , Hanqing Guo , Guangjing Wang , Yuanda Wang , Qiben Yan

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shifted the post-training paradigm from traditional instruction tuning and human preference alignment toward reinforcement learning (RL) focused on reasoning capabilities. However,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Qianxi He , Qingyu Ren , Shanzhe Lei , Xuhong Wang , Yingchun Wang

This paper studies reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) for aligning large language models with human preferences. While RLHF has demonstrated promising results, many algorithms are highly sensitive to misspecifications in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-30 Erhan Xu , Kai Ye , Hongyi Zhou , Luhan Zhu , Francesco Quinzan , Chengchun Shi

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards~(RLVR) has emerged as a powerful learn-to-reason paradigm for large reasoning models to tackle complex tasks. However, the current RLVR paradigm is still not efficient enough, as it works in a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Junjie Zhang , Guozheng Ma , Shunyu Liu , Haoyu Wang , Jiaxing Huang , Ting-En Lin , Fei Huang , Yongbin Li , Dacheng Tao

Designing effective reward functions is crucial to training reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. However, this design is non-trivial, even for domain experts, due to the subjective nature of certain tasks that are hard to quantify…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Rishi Hazra , Alkis Sygkounas , Andreas Persson , Amy Loutfi , Pedro Zuidberg Dos Martires

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong math reasoning abilities through Reinforcement Learning with *Verifiable Rewards* (RLVR), many advanced mathematical problems are proof-based, with no guaranteed way to determine…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Haotong Yang , Zitong Wang , Shijia Kang , Siqi Yang , Wenkai Yu , Xu Niu , Yike Sun , Yi Hu , Zhouchen Lin , Muhan Zhang

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and, at its core, reward modeling have become a crucial part of training powerful large language models (LLMs). One commonly overlooked factor in training high-quality reward models (RMs) is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-19 Kian Ahrabian , Pegah Jandaghi , Negar Mokhberian , Sai Praneeth Karimireddy , Jay Pujara

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in educational settings as interactive tools for collaboration. However, their tendency toward sycophancy, aligning with user beliefs even when incorrect, raises concerns for learning and…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Cansu Koyuturk , Sabrina Guidotti , Dimitri Ognibene

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a key paradigm for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values, yet the reward models at its core remain largely opaque. In this work, we present Sparse Autoencoder For…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Wei Shi , Ziyuan Xie , Sihang Li , Xiang Wang

We provide a theoretical framework for Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF). Our analysis shows that when the true reward function is linear, the widely used maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) converges under both the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-09 Banghua Zhu , Jiantao Jiao , Michael I. Jordan

Large language models exhibit sycophancy, the tendency to shift their stated positions toward perceived user preferences or authority cues regardless of evidence. Standard alignment methods fail to correct this because scalar reward models…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Muhammad Ahmed Mohsin , Ahsan Bilal , Muhammad Umer , Emily Fox

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) replaces costly human labeling with automated verifiers. To reduce verifier hacking, many RLVR systems binarize rewards to $\{0,1\}$, but imperfect verifiers inevitably introduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Xin-Qiang Cai , Wei Wang , Feng Liu , Tongliang Liu , Gang Niu , Masashi Sugiyama

Training language models via reinforcement learning often relies on imperfect proxy rewards, since ground truth rewards that precisely define the intended behavior are rarely available. Standard metrics for assessing the quality of proxy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Shuning Shang , Hubert Strauss , Stanley Wei , Sanjeev Arora , Noam Razin

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) facilitates the alignment of large language models with human preferences, significantly enhancing the quality of interactions between humans and models. InstructGPT implements RLHF through…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Zheng Yuan , Hongyi Yuan , Chuanqi Tan , Wei Wang , Songfang Huang , Fei Huang

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is the standard for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs), yet recent progress has moved beyond canonical text-based methods. This survey synthesizes the new frontier of alignment research…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-07 Raghav Sharma , Manan Mehta , Sai Tiger Raina