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Related papers: How RLHF Amplifies Sycophancy

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Despite its empirical success, Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has been shown to violate almost all the fundamental axioms in social choice theory -- such as majority consistency, pairwise majority consistency, and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-17 Jiancong Xiao , Zhekun Shi , Kaizhao Liu , Qi Long , Weijie J. Su

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences has become essential for safe and beneficial AI deployment. While Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) established the dominant paradigm, a proliferation of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Tarun Raheja , Nilay Pochhi

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) often exhibit sycophantic behavior, agreeing with user-stated opinions even when those contradict factual knowledge. While prior work has documented this tendency, the internal mechanisms that enable such…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Keyu Wang , Jin Li , Shu Yang , Zhuoran Zhang , Di Wang

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is commonly employed to tailor models to human preferences, especially to improve the safety of outputs from large language models (LLMs). Traditionally, this method depends on selecting…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-29 Xiaomin Li , Mingye Gao , Zhiwei Zhang , Jingxuan Fan , Weiyu Li

To design rewards that align with human goals, Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a prominent technique for learning reward functions from human preferences and optimizing policies via reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Taehyun Cho , Seokhun Ju , Seungyub Han , Dohyeong Kim , Kyungjae Lee , Jungwoo Lee

Personalizing large language models (LLMs) to accommodate diverse user preferences is essential for enhancing alignment and user satisfaction. Traditional reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) approaches often rely on monolithic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Avinandan Bose , Zhihan Xiong , Yuejie Chi , Simon Shaolei Du , Lin Xiao , Maryam Fazel

To improve human-preference alignment training, current research has developed numerous preference datasets consisting of preference pairs labeled as "preferred" or "dispreferred". These preference pairs are typically used to encode human…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Chenglong Wang , Yang Gan , Yifu Huo , Yongyu Mu , Qiaozhi He , Murun Yang , Tong Xiao , Chunliang Zhang , Tongran Liu , Jingbo Zhu

Aligning generative models with human preference via RLHF typically suffers from overoptimization, where an imperfectly learned reward model can misguide the generative model to output undesired responses. We investigate this problem in a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-05 Zhihan Liu , Miao Lu , Shenao Zhang , Boyi Liu , Hongyi Guo , Yingxiang Yang , Jose Blanchet , Zhaoran Wang

Standard reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) trains a reward model on pairwise preference data and then uses it for policy optimization. However, while reward models are optimized to capture relative preferences, existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Kyuseong Choi , Dwaipayan Saha , Woojeong Kim , Anish Agarwal , Raaz Dwivedi

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) relies on preference modeling to align machine learning systems with human values, yet the popular approach of random pair sampling with Bradley-Terry modeling is statistically limited and…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Andreas Chouliaras , Dimitris Chatzopoulos

Reinforcement learning is a general method for learning in sequential settings, but it can often be difficult to specify a good reward function when the task is complex. In these cases, preference feedback or expert demonstrations can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-20 Jason R Brown , Carl Henrik Ek , Robert D Mullins

Current RLHF methods such as PPO and DPO typically reduce human preferences to binary labels, which are costly to obtain and too coarse to reflect individual variation. We observe that expressions of satisfaction and dissatisfaction follow…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 YuXuan Zhang

As everyday use cases of large language model (LLM) AI assistants have expanded, it is becoming increasingly important to personalize responses to align to different users' preferences and goals. While reinforcement learning from human…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Hyunji Nam , Yanming Wan , Mickel Liu , Peter Ahnn , Jianxun Lian , Natasha Jaques

Past analyses of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) assume that the human evaluators fully observe the environment. What happens when human feedback is based only on partial observations? We formally define two failure cases:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Leon Lang , Davis Foote , Stuart Russell , Anca Dragan , Erik Jenner , Scott Emmons

Re-inforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has been effective in the task of AI alignment. However, one of the key assumptions of RLHF is that the annotators (referred to as workers from here on out) have a homogeneous response…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Sarvesh Shashidhar , Abhishek Mishra , Madhav Kotecha

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as the primary method for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. The RLHF process typically starts by training a reward model (RM) using human preference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Haoxiang Wang , Wei Xiong , Tengyang Xie , Han Zhao , Tong Zhang

Recently, tremendous strides have been made to align the generation of Large Language Models (LLMs) with human values to mitigate toxic or unhelpful content. Leveraging Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) proves effective and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Mingye Zhu , Yi Liu , Lei Zhang , Junbo Guo , Zhendong Mao

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) involves training policy models (PMs) and reward models (RMs) to align language models with human preferences. Instead of focusing solely on PMs and RMs independently, we propose to examine…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-14 Taiming Lu , Lingfeng Shen , Xinyu Yang , Weiting Tan , Beidi Chen , Huaxiu Yao

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