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To align conditional text generation model outputs with desired behaviors, there has been an increasing focus on training the model using reinforcement learning (RL) with reward functions learned from human annotations. Under this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Richard Yuanzhe Pang , Vishakh Padmakumar , Thibault Sellam , Ankur P. Parikh , He He

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

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has enabled significant advancements within language modeling for powerful, instruction-following models. However, the alignment of these models remains a pressing challenge as the policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Ahmed M. Ahmed , Rafael Rafailov , Stepan Sharkov , Xuechen Li , Sanmi Koyejo

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

Reward-model-based fine-tuning is a central paradigm in aligning Large Language Models with human preferences. However, such approaches critically rely on the assumption that proxy reward models accurately reflect intended supervision, a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Zixuan Liu , Siavash H. Khajavi , Guangkai Jiang , Xinru Liu

Foundation models, specifically Large Language Models (LLMs), have lately gained wide-spread attention and adoption. Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) involves training a reward model to capture desired behaviors, which is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-25 Will LeVine , Benjamin Pikus , Anthony Chen , Sean Hendryx

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated great capabilities in natural language understanding and generation, largely attributed to the intricate alignment process using human feedback. While alignment has become an essential training…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-04 Bocheng Chen , Hanqing Guo , Guangjing Wang , Yuanda Wang , Qiben Yan

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become essential to the post-training of large language models (LLMs) for reasoning, agentic capabilities and alignment. Successful RL relies on sufficient exploration of diverse actions by the model during…

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) remains vulnerable to reward hacking, where models exploit spurious correlations in learned reward models to achieve high scores while violating human intent. Existing mitigations rely on…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Mohammad Beigi , Ming Jin , Junshan Zhang , Qifan Wang , Lifu Huang

Fine-tuning lets practitioners repurpose aligned large language models (LLMs) for new domains, yet recent work reveals emergent misalignment (EMA): Even a small, domain-specific fine-tune can induce harmful behaviors far outside the target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-06 David Kaczér , Magnus Jørgenvåg , Clemens Vetter , Esha Afzal , Robin Haselhorst , Lucie Flek , Florian Mai

Reward hacking in code generation, where models exploit evaluation loopholes to obtain full reward without correctly solving the tasks, poses a critical challenge for Reinforcement Learning (RL) and the deployment of reasoning models.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Lichen Li , Hengguang Zhou , Yijun Liang , Tianyi Zhou , Cho-Jui Hsieh

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback relies on reward models to align large language models with human preferences. However, RLHF often suffers from reward hacking, wherein policy learning exploits flaws in the trained reward model to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Kangwen Zhao , Jianfeng Cai , Jinhua Zhu , Ruopei Sun , Dongyun Xue , Wengang Zhou , Li Li , Houqiang Li

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate transformative potential, yet their reasoning remains inconsistent and unreliable. Reinforcement learning (RL)-based fine-tuning is a key mechanism for improvement, but its effectiveness is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Pei-Chi Pan , Yingbin Liang , Sen Lin

Modern large language models (LLMs) are increasingly fine-tuned via reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) or related reward optimisation schemes. While such procedures improve perceived helpfulness, we investigate whether…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Subramanyam Sahoo

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

Reward modeling in large language models is susceptible to reward hacking, causing models to latch onto superficial features such as the tendency to generate lists or unnecessarily long responses. In reinforcement learning from human…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Taneesh Gupta , Shivam Shandilya , Xuchao Zhang , Rahul Madhavan , Supriyo Ghosh , Chetan Bansal , Huaxiu Yao , Saravan Rajmohan

Chain-of-thought explanations are widely used to inspect the decision process of large language models (LLMs) and to evaluate the trustworthiness of model outputs, making them important for effective collaboration between LLMs and humans.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Pedro Ferreira , Wilker Aziz , Ivan Titov

Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) has been demonstrated to significantly enhance the performance of large language models (LLMs) by aligning their outputs with desired human values through instruction tuning. However, RLHF…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-06 Zhang Ze Yu , Lau Jia Jaw , Zhang Hui , Bryan Kian Hsiang Low

Large Language Models (LLMs) are nowadays expected to generate content aligned with human preferences. Current work focuses on alignment at model training time, through techniques such as Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF).…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-21 James Y. Huang , Sailik Sengupta , Daniele Bonadiman , Yi-An Lai , Arshit Gupta , Nikolaos Pappas , Saab Mansour , Katrin Kirchhoff , Dan Roth