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We show that when large language models learn to reward hack on production RL environments, this can result in egregious emergent misalignment. We start with a pretrained model, impart knowledge of reward hacking strategies via synthetic…
Most reinforcement learning (RL) methods for training large language models (LLMs) require ground-truth labels or task-specific verifiers, limiting scalability when correctness is ambiguous or expensive to obtain. We introduce Reinforcement…
Recent work has shown that deep reinforcement-learning agents can learn to follow language-like instructions from infrequent environment rewards. However, this places on environment designers the onus of designing language-conditional…
A standard practice when using large language models is for users to supplement their instruction with an input context containing new information for the model to process. However, models struggle to reliably follow the input context,…
Specifying reward functions for robots that operate in environments without a natural reward signal can be challenging, and incorrectly specified rewards can incentivise degenerate or dangerous behavior. A promising alternative to manually…
Instruction-following language models are trained to be helpful and safe, yet their safety behavior can deteriorate under benign fine-tuning and worsen under adversarial updates. Existing defenses often offer limited protection or force a…
Reward hacking arises when a model improves a proxy reward by exploiting shortcuts rather than solving the intended task. We study this failure mode through the geometry of reinforcement learning updates in language models and argue that…
Reinforcement learning (RL) agents typically optimize their policies by performing expensive backward passes to update their network parameters. However, some agents can solve new tasks without updating any parameters by simply conditioning…
Many real-world physical control systems are required to satisfy constraints upon deployment. Furthermore, real-world systems are often subject to effects such as non-stationarity, wear-and-tear, uncalibrated sensors and so on. Such effects…
Language models can learn sophisticated language understanding skills from fitting raw text. They also unselectively learn useless corpus statistics and biases, especially during finetuning on domain-specific corpora. In this paper, we…
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,…
Fine-tuning pre-trained cross-lingual language models can transfer task-specific supervision from one language to the others. In this work, we propose to improve cross-lingual fine-tuning with consistency regularization. Specifically, we…
Reinforcement learning (RL) can align language models with non-differentiable reward signals, such as human preferences. However, a major challenge arises from the sparsity of these reward signals - typically, there is only a single reward…
Misalignment between model predictions and intended usage can be detrimental for the deployment of computer vision models. The issue is exacerbated when the task involves complex structured outputs, as it becomes harder to design procedures…
Exposure bias describes the phenomenon that a language model trained under the teacher forcing schema may perform poorly at the inference stage when its predictions are conditioned on its previous predictions unseen from the training…
Machine unlearning, the study of efficiently removing the impact of specific training instances on a model, has garnered increased attention in recent years due to regulatory guidelines such as the \emph{Right to be Forgotten}. Achieving…
Transformer-based large language models exhibit in-context learning, enabling adaptation to downstream tasks via few-shot prompting with demonstrations. In practice, such models are often fine-tuned to improve zero-shot performance on…
Recent language models have achieved impressive performance in natural language tasks by incorporating instructions with task input during fine-tuning. Since all samples in the same natural language task can be explained with the same task…
When training a model on referential dialogue guessing games, the best model is usually chosen based on its task success. We show that in the popular end-to-end approach, this choice prevents the model from learning to generate…
Reinforcement learning for LLMs is vulnerable to reward hacking, where models exploit shortcuts to maximize reward without solving the intended task. We systematically study this phenomenon in coding tasks using an environment-manipulation…