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Related papers: The Limits of Preference Data for Post-Training

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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

Margin-based optimization is fundamental to improving generalization and robustness in classification tasks. In the context of reward model learning from preferences within Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), existing methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Yaswanth Chittepu , Prasann Singhal , Greg Durrett , Scott Niekum

Reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) has become the dominant method to align large models to user preferences. Unlike fine-tuning, for which there are many studies regarding training data memorization, it is not clear how…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Aneesh Pappu , Billy Porter , Ilia Shumailov , Jamie Hayes

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

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

Human feedback has become the de facto standard for evaluating the performance of Large Language Models, and is increasingly being used as a training objective. However, it is not clear which properties of a generated output this single…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Tom Hosking , Phil Blunsom , Max Bartolo

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a powerful paradigm for aligning foundation models to human values and preferences. However, current RLHF techniques cannot account for the naturally occurring differences in individual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-20 Sriyash Poddar , Yanming Wan , Hamish Ivison , Abhishek Gupta , Natasha Jaques

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and its variants have become the de facto standards for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences or specific goals. However, DPO requires high-quality preference data and suffers from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Zhuotong Chen , Fang Liu , Jennifer Zhu , Wanyu Du , Yanjun Qi

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has become the standard approach for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences, allowing LLMs to demonstrate remarkable abilities in various tasks. Existing methods work…

One of the challenges of aligning large models with human preferences lies in both the data requirements and the technical complexities of current approaches. Predominant methods, such as RLHF, involve multiple steps, each demanding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Siliang Zeng , Yao Liu , Huzefa Rangwala , George Karypis , Mingyi Hong , Rasool Fakoor

Large language models in the past have typically relied on some form of reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) to better align model responses with human preferences. However, because of oft-observed instabilities when…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-15 Xiangkun Hu , Tong He , David Wipf

Aligning language models with human preferences through reinforcement learning from human feedback is crucial for their safe and effective deployment. The human preference is typically represented through comparison where one response is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Hoang Anh Just , Ming Jin , Anit Sahu , Huy Phan , Ruoxi Jia

Reinforcement learning (RL) faces challenges in evaluating policy trajectories within intricate game tasks due to the difficulty in designing comprehensive and precise reward functions. This inherent difficulty curtails the broader…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Zichao Shen , Tianchen Zhu , Qingyun Sun , Shiqi Gao , Jianxin Li

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

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences has become essential for safe and beneficial AI deployment. While Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) established the dominant paradigm, a proliferation of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Tarun Raheja , Nilay Pochhi

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a prevalent approach to align AI systems with human values by learning rewards from human preference data. Due to various reasons, however, such data typically takes the form of rankings…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Ilgee Hong , Zichong Li , Alexander Bukharin , Yixiao Li , Haoming Jiang , Tianbao Yang , Tuo Zhao

Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) is at the core of fine-tuning methods for generative AI models for language and images. Such feedback is often sought as rank or preference feedback from human raters, as opposed to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-19 Akhil Agnihotri , Rahul Jain , Deepak Ramachandran , Zheng Wen

This paper studies the alignment process of generative models with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). We first identify the primary challenges of existing popular methods like offline PPO and offline DPO as lacking in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-02 Wei Xiong , Hanze Dong , Chenlu Ye , Ziqi Wang , Han Zhong , Heng Ji , Nan Jiang , Tong Zhang

Learning a reward function from human preferences is challenging as it typically requires having a high-fidelity simulator or using expensive and potentially unsafe actual physical rollouts in the environment. However, in many tasks the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-18 Daniel Shin , Daniel S. Brown , Anca D. Dragan

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has recently surged in popularity, particularly for aligning large language models and other AI systems with human intentions. At its core, RLHF can be viewed as a specialized instance of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-10 Yujie Zhao , Jose Efraim Aguilar Escamill , Weyl Lu , Huazheng Wang