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Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various research domains, including the field of Information Retrieval (IR). However, the responses generated by off-the-shelf LLMs tend to be generic, i.e.,…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-03-27 Qian Dong , Yiding Liu , Qingyao Ai , Zhijing Wu , Haitao Li , Yiqun Liu , Shuaiqiang Wang , Dawei Yin , Shaoping Ma

Large language models (LLMs) are often sycophantic, prioritizing agreement with their users over accurate or objective statements. This problematic behavior becomes more pronounced during reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF),…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Henry Papadatos , Rachel Freedman

Rewards serve as proxies for human preferences and play a crucial role in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). However, if these rewards are inherently imperfect, exhibiting various biases, they can adversely affect the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Sheng Ouyang , Yulan Hu , Ge Chen , Qingyang Li , Fuzheng Zhang , Yong Liu

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) describes the problem of learning an unknown reward function of a Markov Decision Process (MDP) from observed behavior of an agent. Since the agent's behavior originates in its policy and MDP policies…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-04-14 Michael Herman , Tobias Gindele , Jörg Wagner , Felix Schmitt , Wolfram Burgard

Despite notable advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), most state-of-the-art models have not undergone thorough alignment with human preferences. This gap exists because current alignment research has primarily achieved…

Text classification models are typically trained via supervised fine-tuning (SFT). However, SFT essentially performs behavior cloning from instance-wise labels and thus fails to adequately capture relative preference relations among…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Tianxiang Xu , Xiaoyan Zhu , Xin Lai , Jiayin Wang

Learning to rank (LTR) plays a crucial role in various Information Retrieval (IR) tasks. Although supervised LTR methods based on fine-grained relevance labels (e.g., document-level annotations) have achieved significant success, their…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-08-21 Yiteng Tu , Zhichao Xu , Tao Yang , Weihang Su , Yujia Zhou , Yiqun Liu , Fen Lin , Qin Liu , Qingyao Ai

Great success has been reported using Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) to align large language models, with open preference datasets enabling wider experimentation, particularly for "helpfulness" in tasks like dialogue and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-12 Prasann Singhal , Tanya Goyal , Jiacheng Xu , Greg Durrett

Reward functions are difficult to design and often hard to align with human intent. Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms address these problems by learning reward functions from human feedback. However, the majority of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-28 Joey Hejna , Dorsa Sadigh

The successes of reinforcement learning in recent years are underpinned by the characterization of suitable reward functions. However, in settings where such rewards are non-intuitive, difficult to define, or otherwise error-prone in their…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2023-03-02 Mohammad Afzal , Sankalp Gambhir , Ashutosh Gupta , Krishna S , Ashutosh Trivedi , Alvaro Velasquez

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) offers a promising approach to aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. Typically, a reward model is trained or supplied to act as a proxy for humans in evaluating…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Jiahui Li , Lin Li , Tai-wei Chang , Kun Kuang , Long Chen , Jun Zhou , Cheng Yang

The success of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) in language model alignment is critically dependent on the capability of the reward model (RM). However, as the training process progresses, the output distribution of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-02 Shihan Dou , Yan Liu , Enyu Zhou , Tianlong Li , Haoxiang Jia , Limao Xiong , Xin Zhao , Junjie Ye , Rui Zheng , Tao Gui , Qi Zhang , Xuanjing Huang

Learning from human feedback (LHF) -- and in particular learning from pairwise preferences -- has recently become a crucial ingredient in training large language models (LLMs), and has been the subject of much research. Most recent works…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-11 Vincent Dumoulin , Daniel D. Johnson , Pablo Samuel Castro , Hugo Larochelle , Yann Dauphin

We propose Reinforcement Learning with Explicit Human Values (RLEV), a method that aligns Large Language Model (LLM) optimization directly with quantifiable human value signals. While Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Dian Yu , Yulai Zhao , Kishan Panaganti , Linfeng Song , Haitao Mi , Dong Yu

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has achieved considerable success in aligning large language models (LLMs) by modeling human preferences with a learnable reward model and employing a reinforcement learning algorithm to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Jianfeng Cai , Jinhua Zhu , Ruopei Sun , Yue Wang , Li Li , Wengang Zhou , Houqiang Li

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is central in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values and expectations. However, the process remains susceptible to governance challenges, including evaluator bias,…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Dana Alsagheer , Abdulrahman Kamal , Mohammad Kamal , Weidong Shi

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as the primary method for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. While it enables LLMs to achieve human-level alignment, it often incurs significant…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Shivank Garg , Ayush Singh , Shweta Singh , Paras Chopra

Reinforcement learning provides a powerful and general framework for decision making and control, but its application in practice is often hindered by the need for extensive feature and reward engineering. Deep reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-15 Justin Fu , Katie Luo , Sergey Levine

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has become an essential step in fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) to align them with human preferences. However, human labelers are selfish and have diverse preferences. They may…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-25 Shugang Hao , Lingjie Duan

Designing effective reward functions remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), as it often requires extensive human effort and domain expertise. While RL from human feedback has been successful in aligning agents with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Tung Minh Luu , Younghwan Lee , Donghoon Lee , Sunho Kim , Min Jun Kim , Chang D. Yoo