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Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is crucial for aligning large language models with human preferences. While recent research has focused on algorithmic improvements, the importance of prompt-data construction has been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-03 Wei Shen , Guanlin Liu , Zheng Wu , Ruofei Zhu , Qingping Yang , Chao Xin , Yu Yue , Lin Yan

Reward models are central to aligning large language models, yet they often overfit to spurious cues such as response length and overly agreeable tone. Most prior work weakens these cues directly by penalizing or controlling specific…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Yunsheng Lu , Zijiang Yang , Licheng Pan , Zhixuan Chu

Learning policies via preference-based reward learning is an increasingly popular method for customizing agent behavior, but has been shown anecdotally to be prone to spurious correlations and reward hacking behaviors. While much prior work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-21 Jeremy Tien , Jerry Zhi-Yang He , Zackory Erickson , Anca D. Dragan , Daniel S. Brown

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as an effective approach to aligning large language models (LLMs) to human preferences. RLHF contains three steps, i.e., human preference collecting, reward learning, and policy…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-29 Hao Lang , Fei Huang , Yongbin Li

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

Reward models (RMs) play a crucial role in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), aligning model behavior with human preferences. However, existing benchmarks for reward models show a weak correlation with the performance of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Sunghwan Kim , Dongjin Kang , Taeyoon Kwon , Hyungjoo Chae , Dongha Lee , Jinyoung Yeo

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has become a cornerstone for aligning large language models with human preferences. However, the heterogeneity of human feedback, driven by diverse individual contexts and preferences, poses…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-05 Seong Jin Lee , Will Wei Sun , Yufeng Liu

Recent strides in large language models (LLMs) have yielded remarkable performance, leveraging reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to significantly enhance generation and alignment capabilities. However, RLHF encounters…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Kuo Liao , Shuang Li , Meng Zhao , Liqun Liu , Mengge Xue , Zhenyu Hu , Honglin Han , Chengguo Yin

A centerpiece of the ever-popular reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) approach to fine-tuning autoregressive language models is the explicit training of a reward model to emulate human feedback, distinct from the language…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-22 Wanqiao Xu , Shi Dong , Dilip Arumugam , Benjamin Van Roy

The ability of reinforcement learning algorithms to learn effective policies is determined by the rewards available during training. However, for practical problems, obtaining large quantities of reward labels is often infeasible due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Shreyas Chaudhari , Renhao Zhang , Philip S. Thomas , Bruno Castro da Silva

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and, at its core, reward modeling have become a crucial part of training powerful large language models (LLMs). One commonly overlooked factor in training high-quality reward models (RMs) is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-19 Kian Ahrabian , Pegah Jandaghi , Negar Mokhberian , Sai Praneeth Karimireddy , Jay Pujara

A key challenge in reward learning from human input is that desired agent behavior often changes based on context. For example, a robot must adapt to avoid a stove once it becomes hot. We observe that while high-level preferences (e.g.,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Alexandra Forsey-Smerek , Julie Shah , Andreea Bobu

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) provides a principled framework for aligning AI systems with human preference data. For various reasons, e.g., personal bias, context ambiguity, lack of training, etc, human annotators may…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-10 Alexander Bukharin , Ilgee Hong , Haoming Jiang , Zichong Li , Qingru Zhang , Zixuan Zhang , Tuo Zhao

Reward design is a fundamental problem in reinforcement learning (RL). A misspecified or poorly designed reward can result in low sample efficiency and undesired behaviors. In this paper, we propose the idea of programmatic reward design,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-10 Weichao Zhou , Wenchao Li

Reward modeling has emerged as a crucial component in aligning large language models with human values. Significant attention has focused on using reward models as a means for fine-tuning generative models. However, the reward models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Brian Christian , Hannah Rose Kirk , Jessica A. F. Thompson , Christopher Summerfield , Tsvetomira Dumbalska

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a widely adopted approach for aligning large language models with human values. However, RLHF relies on a reward model that is trained with a limited amount of human preference data,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Shun Zhang , Zhenfang Chen , Sunli Chen , Yikang Shen , Zhiqing Sun , Chuang Gan

In this work, we study the issue of reward hacking on the response length, a challenge emerging in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) on LLMs. A well-formatted, verbose but less helpful response from the LLMs can often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Lichang Chen , Chen Zhu , Davit Soselia , Jiuhai Chen , Tianyi Zhou , Tom Goldstein , Heng Huang , Mohammad Shoeybi , Bryan Catanzaro

Training language models via reinforcement learning often relies on imperfect proxy rewards, since ground truth rewards that precisely define the intended behavior are rarely available. Standard metrics for assessing the quality of proxy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Shuning Shang , Hubert Strauss , Stanley Wei , Sanjeev Arora , Noam Razin

Reward models (RMs) are at the crux of successfully using RLHF to align pretrained models to human preferences, yet there has been relatively little study that focuses on evaluation of those models. Evaluating reward models presents an…

Designing a reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) algorithm to approximate a human's unobservable reward function requires assuming, implicitly or explicitly, a model of human preferences. A preference model that poorly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Stephane Hatgis-Kessell , W. Bradley Knox , Serena Booth , Peter Stone