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Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has evolved to be one of the main methods for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs). However, existing RLHF methods are non-robust, and their performance deteriorates if the downstream…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Debmalya Mandal , Paulius Sasnauskas , Goran Radanovic

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) was introduced and used recently for promoting reasoning in LLMs under verifiable (binary) rewards. We show that the mean + variance calibration of these rewards induces a weighted contrastive loss…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Youssef Mroueh

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a pivotal technique for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences, yet it is susceptible to reward overoptimization, in which policy models overfit to the reward model,…

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a variant of reinforcement learning (RL) that learns from human feedback instead of relying on an engineered reward function. Building on prior work on the related setting of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Timo Kaufmann , Paul Weng , Viktor Bengs , Eyke Hüllermeier

In this paper, we study the offline and online settings of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) with KL-regularization -- a widely used objective function in large language model alignment -- under the $\epsilon$ local…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Yulian Wu , Rushil Thareja , Praneeth Vepakomma , Francesco Orabona

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a important paradigm for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences during post-training. This framework typically involves two stages: first, training a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Wenyuan Xu , Xiaochen Zuo , Chao Xin , Yu Yue , Lin Yan , Yonghui Wu

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) allows us to train models, such as language models (LMs), to follow complex human preferences. In RLHF for LMs, we first train an LM using supervised fine-tuning, sample pairs of responses,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Johannes Ackermann , Takashi Ishida , Masashi Sugiyama

Reverse-Kullback-Leibler (KL) regularization has emerged to be a predominant technique used to enhance policy optimization in reinforcement learning (RL) and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), which forces the learned policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-12 Heyang Zhao , Chenlu Ye , Quanquan Gu , Tong Zhang

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has become a cornerstone technique for post-training large language models. While most existing approaches rely on the reverse KL-regularization, recent empirical studies have begun…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Di Wu , Chengshuai Shi , Jing Yang , Cong Shen

Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) has been the dominant approach for improving the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Recently, Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has simplified this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Yining Wang , Jinman Zhao , Chuangxin Zhao , Shuhao Guan , Gerald Penn , Shinan Liu

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) are pivotal methodologies in reward learning, which involve inferring and shaping the underlying reward function of sequential decision-making…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-16 Kihyun Kim , Jiawei Zhang , Asuman Ozdaglar , Pablo A. Parrilo

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

We investigate Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) in the context of a general preference oracle. In particular, we do not assume the existence of a reward function and an oracle preference signal drawn from the Bradley-Terry…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-13 Chenlu Ye , Wei Xiong , Yuheng Zhang , Hanze Dong , Nan Jiang , Tong Zhang

Reward inference (learning a reward model from human preferences) is a critical intermediate step in the Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) pipeline for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs). In practice, RLHF faces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Qining Zhang , Lei Ying

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

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

Large language models (LLMs) trained via pretraining and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) can still produce harmful and misaligned outputs, or struggle in domains like math and coding. Reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training methods,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Zhichao Wang , Kiran Ramnath , Bin Bi , Shiva Kumar Pentyala , Sougata Chaudhuri , Shubham Mehrotra , Zixu , Zhu , Xiang-Bo Mao , Sitaram Asur , Na , Cheng

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (\textbf{RLHF}) has emerged as a dominant approach for aligning LLM outputs with human preferences. Inspired by the success of RLHF, we study the performance of multiple algorithms that learn from…

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as an effective approach to aligning large language models (LLMs) to human preferences. RLHF contains three steps, i.e., human preference collecting, reward learning, and policy…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-29 Hao Lang , Fei Huang , Yongbin Li

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