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Reinforcement learning with human feedback~(RLHF) is critical for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preference. Compared to the widely studied offline version of RLHF, \emph{e.g.} direct preference optimization (DPO), recent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-13 Lichang Chen , Jiuhai Chen , Chenxi Liu , John Kirchenbauer , Davit Soselia , Chen Zhu , Tom Goldstein , Tianyi Zhou , Heng Huang

The ability of LLMs to represent diverse perspectives is critical as they increasingly impact society. However, recent studies reveal that alignment algorithms such as RLHF and DPO significantly reduce the diversity of LLM outputs. Not only…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Stewart Slocum , Asher Parker-Sartori , Dylan Hadfield-Menell

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

Traditional RLHF-based LLM alignment methods explicitly maximize the expected rewards from a separate reward model. More recent supervised alignment methods like Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) circumvent this phase to avoid problems…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-03 Abhijnan Nath , Changsoo Jung , Ethan Seefried , Nikhil Krishnaswamy

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) assumes annotator preferences reflect stable internal states. We challenge this through three experiments spanning the preference pipeline. In a human choice blindness study, 91% of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Wenbin Wu

While large language models demonstrate remarkable capabilities, they often present challenges in terms of safety, alignment with human values, and stability during training. Here, we focus on two prevalent methods used to align these…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-26 Gabriel Mukobi , Peter Chatain , Su Fong , Robert Windesheim , Gitta Kutyniok , Kush Bhatia , Silas Alberti

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a powerful technique for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, effectively aligning LLMs with diverse human preferences remains a significant…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-03 Chengao Li , Hanyu Zhang , Yunkun Xu , Hongyan Xue , Xiang Ao , Qing He

Fine-grained control over large language models (LLMs) remains a significant challenge, hindering their adaptability to diverse user needs. While Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) shows promise in aligning LLMs, its reliance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-07 Haoxiang Wang , Yong Lin , Wei Xiong , Rui Yang , Shizhe Diao , Shuang Qiu , Han Zhao , Tong Zhang

Direct alignment methods are increasingly used for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, these methods suffer from the issues of verbosity and likelihood displacement, which can be driven by the noisy…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Peter Chen , Xi Chen , Wotao Yin , Tianyi Lin

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a powerful technique to make large language models (LLMs) more capable in complex settings. RLHF proceeds as collecting human preference data, training a reward model on said…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-05 Nathan Lambert , Roberto Calandra

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) effectively aligns Large Language Models (LLMs) with aggregate human preferences but often fails to address the diverse and conflicting needs of individual users. To overcome this issue, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Yinlam Chow , Guy Tennenholtz , Ted Yun , James Harrison , Arthur Gretton , Andre Barreto , Bo Dai

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) facilitates the alignment of large language models (LLMs) with human preferences, thereby enhancing the quality of responses generated. A critical component of RLHF is the reward model,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Yulan Hu , Qingyang Li , Sheng Ouyang , Ge Chen , Kaihui Chen , Lijun Mei , Xucheng Ye , Fuzheng Zhang , Yong Liu

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a more computationally efficient alternative to Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), eliminating the need for reward models and online…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Xin Mao , Feng-Lin Li , Huimin Xu , Wei Zhang , Wang Chen , Anh Tuan Luu

Post-alignment of large language models (LLMs) is critical in improving their utility, safety, and alignment with human intentions. Direct preference optimisation (DPO) has become one of the most widely used algorithms for achieving this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-06 Rasul Tutnov , Antoine Grosnit , Haitham Bou-Ammar

With the rapid advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), aligning LLMs with human preferences become increasingly important. Although Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) proves effective, it is complicated and highly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Shiqi Wang , Zhengze Zhang , Rui Zhao , Fei Tan , Cam Tu Nguyen

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as the standard paradigm for aligning large language models with human preferences. However, reward-based methods grounded in the Bradley-Terry assumption struggle to capture the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Fang Wu , Xu Huang , Weihao Xuan , Zhiwei Zhang , Yijia Xiao , Guancheng Wan , Xiaomin Li , Bing Hu , Peng Xia , Jure Leskovec , Yejin Choi

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences is essential for safe and useful LLMs. Previous works mainly adopt reinforcement learning (RLHF) and direct preference optimization (DPO) with human feedback for alignment.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-03 Tianci Xue , Ziqi Wang , Heng Ji

Preference optimization, particularly through Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), has achieved significant success in aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) to adhere to human intentions. Unlike offline alignment with a fixed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-06 Shenao Zhang , Donghan Yu , Hiteshi Sharma , Han Zhong , Zhihan Liu , Ziyi Yang , Shuohang Wang , Hany Hassan , Zhaoran Wang

Margin-based optimization is fundamental to improving generalization and robustness in classification tasks. In the context of reward model learning from preferences within Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), existing methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Yaswanth Chittepu , Prasann Singhal , Greg Durrett , Scott Niekum

We apply preference modeling and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to finetune language models to act as helpful and harmless assistants. We find this alignment training improves performance on almost all NLP evaluations,…