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Related papers: Reward Shaping to Mitigate Reward Hacking in RLHF

200 papers

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has played a crucial role in the success of large models such as ChatGPT. RLHF is a reinforcement learning framework which combines human feedback to improve learning effectiveness and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-28 Feiyang Han , Yimin Wei , Zhaofeng Liu , Yanxing Qi

This work proposes `PET', a novel pessimistic reward fine-tuning method, to learn a pessimistic reward model robust against reward hacking in offline reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Traditional reward modeling techniques…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Yinglun Xu , Hangoo Kang , Tarun Suresh , Yuxuan Wan , Gagandeep Singh

Reward shaping is one of the most effective methods to tackle the crucial yet challenging problem of credit assignment in Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, designing shaping functions usually requires much expert knowledge and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-29 Haosheng Zou , Tongzheng Ren , Dong Yan , Hang Su , Jun Zhu

Fine-grained control over large language models (LLMs) remains a significant challenge, hindering their adaptability to diverse user needs. While Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) shows promise in aligning LLMs, its reliance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-07 Haoxiang Wang , Yong Lin , Wei Xiong , Rui Yang , Shizhe Diao , Shuang Qiu , Han Zhao , Tong Zhang

Aligning generative recommender systems to user preferences via post-training is critical for closing the gap between next-item prediction and actual recommendation quality. Existing post-training methods are ill-suited for production-scale…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Keertana Chidambaram , Sanath Kumar Krishnamurthy , Qiuling Xu , Ko-Jen Hsiao , Moumita Bhattacharya

We introduce a new benchmark for reward models that quantifies their ability to produce strong language models through RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback). The gold-standard approach is to run a full RLHF training pipeline and…

Despite the success of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) in aligning language models with human values, reward hacking, also termed reward overoptimization, remains a critical challenge. This issue primarily arises from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-04 Yuchun Miao , Sen Zhang , Liang Ding , Rong Bao , Lefei Zhang , Dacheng Tao

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

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

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

The reward model has become increasingly important in alignment, assessment, and data construction for large language models (LLMs). Most existing researchers focus on enhancing reward models through data improvements, following the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-09 Shujun Liu , Xiaoyu Shen , Yuhang Lai , Siyuan Wang , Shengbin Yue , Zengfeng Huang , Xuanjing Huang , Zhongyu Wei

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

Reward models (RMs) play a crucial role in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), aligning model behavior with human preferences. However, existing benchmarks for reward models show a weak correlation with the performance of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Sunghwan Kim , Dongjin Kang , Taeyoon Kwon , Hyungjoo Chae , Dongha Lee , Jinyoung Yeo

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) typically relies on static reward models to align Large Language Models with human preferences. However, human values are inherently diverse and heterogeneous, and a single reward model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Zhenyu Sun , Zheng Xu , Ermin Wei

Despite the success of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) in aligning language models with human values, reward hacking-or reward over-optimization-remains a major challenge. We identify two key obstacles to its mitigation:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Yuchun Miao , Liang Ding , Sen Zhang , Rong Bao , Lefei Zhang , Dacheng Tao

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

Reinforcement learning has seen wide success in finetuning large language models to better align with instructions via human feedback. The so-called algorithm, Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) demonstrates impressive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-02-13 Tianjun Zhang , Fangchen Liu , Justin Wong , Pieter Abbeel , Joseph E. Gonzalez

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made substantial strides in structured tasks through Reinforcement Learning (RL), demonstrating proficiency in mathematical reasoning and code generation. However, applying RL in broader domains like…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Hao Sun , Yunyi Shen , Jean-Francois Ton , Mihaela van der Schaar

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is an effective approach for aligning language models to human preferences. Central to RLHF is learning a reward function for scoring human preferences. Two main approaches for learning a…

Reward shaping is an effective technique for incorporating domain knowledge into reinforcement learning (RL). Existing approaches such as potential-based reward shaping normally make full use of a given shaping reward function. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-06 Yujing Hu , Weixun Wang , Hangtian Jia , Yixiang Wang , Yingfeng Chen , Jianye Hao , Feng Wu , Changjie Fan