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The deployment of large language models (LLMs) raises significant ethical and safety concerns. While LLM alignment techniques are adopted to improve model safety and trustworthiness, adversaries can exploit these techniques to undermine…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Rui Zhang , Hongwei Li , Yun Shen , Xinyue Shen , Wenbo Jiang , Guowen Xu , Yang Liu , Michael Backes , Yang Zhang

Fine-tuning large language models on narrow data with harmful content produces broadly misaligned behavior on unrelated prompts, a phenomenon known as emergent misalignment. We propose that emergent misalignment involves persona-model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Davi Bastos Costa , Renato Vicente

Generalizable alignment is a core challenge for deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) safely in real-world NLP applications. Current alignment methods, including Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), often fail to guarantee…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-07 Jaymari Chua , Chen Wang , Lina Yao

A common paradigm to improve the performance of large language models is optimizing for a reward model. Reward models assign a numerical score to an LLM's output that indicates, for example, how likely it is to align with user preferences…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-06 Hadi Khalaf , Claudio Mayrink Verdun , Alex Oesterling , Himabindu Lakkaraju , Flavio du Pin Calmon

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has proven effective in aligning large language models with human preferences, inspiring the development of reward-centric diffusion reinforcement learning (RDRL) to achieve similar…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Kwanyoung Kim , Byeongsu Sim

The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has not only provided numerous opportunities but also presented significant challenges. This becomes particularly evident when LLMs inadvertently generate harmful or toxic content,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Kai Chen , Chunwei Wang , Kuo Yang , Jianhua Han , Lanqing Hong , Fei Mi , Hang Xu , Zhengying Liu , Wenyong Huang , Zhenguo Li , Dit-Yan Yeung , Lifeng Shang , Xin Jiang , Qun Liu

Aligning the behavior of Large language models (LLMs) with human intentions and values remains a critical challenge. Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) aligns LLMs by training a reward model (RM) on human preferences and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-25 Jiayi Zhou , Jiaming Ji , Juntao Dai , Dong Li , Yaodong Yang

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences is critical to recent advances in generative artificial intelligence. Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is widely applied to achieve this objective. A key step in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-03 Pangpang Liu , Chengchun Shi , Will Wei Sun

Recent work discovered Emergent Misalignment (EM): fine-tuning large language models on narrowly harmful datasets can lead them to become broadly misaligned. A survey of experts prior to publication revealed this was highly unexpected,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-16 Edward Turner , Anna Soligo , Mia Taylor , Senthooran Rajamanoharan , Neel Nanda

Reward Models (RMs) are crucial for online alignment of language models (LMs) with human preferences. However, RM-based preference-tuning is vulnerable to reward hacking, whereby LM policies learn undesirable behaviors from flawed RMs. By…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Daniel Fein , Max Lamparth , Violet Xiang , Mykel J. Kochenderfer , Nick Haber

Reward learning enables the application of reinforcement learning (RL) to tasks where reward is defined by human judgment, building a model of reward by asking humans questions. Most work on reward learning has used simulated environments,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-01-10 Daniel M. Ziegler , Nisan Stiennon , Jeffrey Wu , Tom B. Brown , Alec Radford , Dario Amodei , Paul Christiano , Geoffrey Irving

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences through reinforcement learning (RLHF) can lead to reward hacking, where LLMs exploit failures in the reward model (RM) to achieve seemingly high rewards without meeting the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-23 Alexandre Ramé , Nino Vieillard , Léonard Hussenot , Robert Dadashi , Geoffrey Cideron , Olivier Bachem , Johan Ferret

Language models (LMs) trained on vast quantities of text data can acquire sophisticated skills such as generating summaries, answering questions or generating code. However, they also manifest behaviors that violate human preferences, e.g.,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-19 Tomasz Korbak

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 models have become a staple in modern NLP, serving as not only a scalable text evaluator, but also an indispensable component in many alignment recipes and inference-time algorithms. However, while recent reward models increase…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Zhaofeng Wu , Michihiro Yasunaga , Andrew Cohen , Yoon Kim , Asli Celikyilmaz , Marjan Ghazvininejad

Reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) is shown to largely benefit from precise reward models (RMs). However, recent studies in reward modeling schemes are skewed towards English, limiting the applicability of RLHF in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-24 Jiwoo Hong , Noah Lee , Rodrigo Martínez-Castaño , César Rodríguez , James Thorne

Misalignment in Large Language Models (LLMs) arises when model behavior diverges from human expectations and fails to simultaneously satisfy safety, value, and cultural dimensions, which must co-occur in real-world settings to solve a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Usman Naseem , Gautam Siddharth Kashyap , Rafiq Ali , Ebad Shabbir , Sushant Kumar Ray , Abdullah Mohammad , Agrima Seth

Large language models (LLMs), despite possessing latent safety understanding from their vast pretraining data, remain vulnerable to generating harmful content and exhibit issues such as over-refusal and utility degradation after safety…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Yi Zhang , An Zhang , XiuYu Zhang , Leheng Sheng , Yuxin Chen , Zhenkai Liang , Xiang Wang

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has been widely adopted to align language models (LMs) with human preference. Prior RLHF works typically take a bandit formulation, which, though intuitive, ignores the sequential nature of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-07 Yueqin Yin , Shentao Yang , Yujia Xie , Ziyi Yang , Yuting Sun , Hany Awadalla , Weizhu Chen , Mingyuan Zhou

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a powerful technique to make large language models (LLMs) easier to use and more effective. A core piece of the RLHF process is the training and utilization of a model of…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2023-11-29 Nathan Lambert , Thomas Krendl Gilbert , Tom Zick