English
Related papers

Related papers: Mitigating Reward Over-Optimization in RLHF via Be…

200 papers

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has become a core post-training step for aligning large language models, yet the reward signal used in RLHF is only a learned proxy for true human utility. From an operations research…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Yikai Wang , Shang Liu , Jose Blanchet

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) often suffers from noisy or imperfect reward supervision in real-world settings, which undermines policy stability and generalization. Such noise may cause models to lose attention on key…

Reward models trained on human preference data have demonstrated strong effectiveness in aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human intent under the framework of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). However, RLHF remains…

Aligning human preference and value is an important requirement for building contemporary foundation models and embodied AI. However, popular approaches such as reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) break down the task into…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Chenliang Li , Siliang Zeng , Zeyi Liao , Jiaxiang Li , Dongyeop Kang , Alfredo Garcia , Mingyi Hong

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

In this paper, we study reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) under an episodic Markov decision process with a general trajectory-wise reward model. We developed a model-free RLHF best policy identification algorithm, called…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-22 Qining Zhang , Honghao Wei , Lei Ying

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values and intentions is crucial for their utility, honesty, and safety. Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a popular approach to achieve this alignment, but it faces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Junkang Wu , Xue Wang , Zhengyi Yang , Jiancan Wu , Jinyang Gao , Bolin Ding , Xiang Wang , Xiangnan He

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO)-based reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a widely adopted paradigm for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, its training pipeline suffers from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Kaizhuo Yan , Yingjie Yu , Yifan Yu , Haizhong Zheng , Fan Lai

Large Language Models (LLMs) can acquire extensive world knowledge through pre-training on large corpora. However, due to exposure to low-quality data, LLMs may exhibit harmful behavior without aligning with human values. The dominant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-11 Tianhao Wu , Banghua Zhu , Ruoyu Zhang , Zhaojin Wen , Kannan Ramchandran , Jiantao Jiao

With the rapid development and widespread application of Large Language Models (LLMs), their potential safety risks have attracted widespread attention. Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has been adopted to enhance the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Shiji Zhao , Mengyang Wang , Shukun Xiong , Fangzhou Chen , Qihui Zhu , Shouwei Ruan , Yisong Xiao , Ranjie Duan , Xun Chen , XingXing Wei

Online and offline RLHF methods, such as PPO and DPO, have been highly successful in aligning AI with human preferences. Despite their success, however, these methods suffer from fundamental limitations: (a) Models trained with RLHF can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Eugene Choi , Arash Ahmadian , Matthieu Geist , Oilvier Pietquin , Mohammad Gheshlaghi Azar

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

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a widely adopted approach for aligning large language models with human values. However, RLHF relies on a reward model that is trained with a limited amount of human preference data,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Shun Zhang , Zhenfang Chen , Sunli Chen , Yikang Shen , Zhiqing Sun , Chuang Gan

Designing reward functions for efficiently guiding reinforcement learning (RL) agents toward specific behaviors is a complex task. This is challenging since it requires the identification of reward structures that are not sparse and that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Dhawal Gupta , Yash Chandak , Scott M. Jordan , Philip S. Thomas , Bruno Castro da Silva

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a reliable approach to aligning large language models (LLMs) to human preferences. Among the plethora of RLHF techniques, proximal policy optimization (PPO) is of the most…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-06 Banghua Zhu , Hiteshi Sharma , Felipe Vieira Frujeri , Shi Dong , Chenguang Zhu , Michael I. Jordan , Jiantao Jiao

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

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

In the post-training of large language models (LLMs), Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is an effective approach to achieve generation aligned with human preferences. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) allows for policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-16 Motoki Omura , Yasuhiro Fujita , Toshiki Kataoka

As large language models increasingly drive real-world applications, aligning them with human values becomes paramount. Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a key technique, translating preference data into…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-07 Yunzhen Feng , Ariel Kwiatkowski , Kunhao Zheng , Julia Kempe , Yaqi Duan

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