English
Related papers

Related papers: How RLHF Amplifies Sycophancy

200 papers

Reinforcement learning is used to align language models with human preference signals after first pre-training the model to predict the next token of text within a large corpus using likelihood maximization. Before being deployed in a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-30 Alec Solway

When applying reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), the reward is learned from data and, therefore, always has some error. It is common to mitigate this by regularizing the policy with KL divergence from a base model, with the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-11 Thomas Kwa , Drake Thomas , Adrià Garriga-Alonso

The trustworthiness of Large Language Models (LLMs) refers to the extent to which their outputs are reliable, safe, and ethically aligned, and it has become a crucial consideration alongside their cognitive performance. In practice,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Aaron J. Li , Satyapriya Krishna , Himabindu Lakkaraju

Large language models (LLMs) trained via pretraining and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) can still produce harmful and misaligned outputs, or struggle in domains like math and coding. Reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training methods,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Zhichao Wang , Kiran Ramnath , Bin Bi , Shiva Kumar Pentyala , Sougata Chaudhuri , Shubham Mehrotra , Zixu , Zhu , Xiang-Bo Mao , Sitaram Asur , Na , Cheng

A reliable reward model is essential for aligning large language models with human preferences through reinforcement learning from human feedback. However, standard reward models are susceptible to spurious features that are not causally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Yupei Yang , Lin Yang , Wanxi Deng , Lin Qu , Fan Feng , Biwei Huang , Shikui Tu , Lei Xu

Reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) has become the dominant method to align large models to user preferences. Unlike fine-tuning, for which there are many studies regarding training data memorization, it is not clear how…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Aneesh Pappu , Billy Porter , Ilia Shumailov , Jamie Hayes

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a recent technique to improve the quality of the text generated by a language model, making it closer to what humans would generate. A core ingredient in RLHF's success in aligning and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-08 Miguel Moura Ramos , Patrick Fernandes , António Farinhas , André F. T. Martins

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has become an essential step in fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) to align them with human preferences. However, human labelers are selfish and have diverse preferences. They may…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-25 Shugang Hao , Lingjie Duan

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has proven effective in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences, but often at the cost of reduced output diversity. This trade-off between diversity and alignment…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Haoran Sun , Yekun Chai , Shuohuan Wang , Yu Sun , Hua Wu , Haifeng Wang

Reinforcement learning has emerged as a powerful paradigm for post-training large language models (LLMs) to improve reasoning. Approaches like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-26 Yanzhi Zhang , Zhaoxi Zhang , Haoxiang Guan , Yilin Cheng , Yitong Duan , Chen Wang , Yue Wang , Shuxin Zheng , Jiyan He

The burgeoning field of autonomous driving necessitates the seamless integration of autonomous vehicles (AVs) with human-driven vehicles, calling for more predictable AV behavior and enhanced interaction with human drivers. Human-like…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2024-08-09 Yuting Wang , Lu Liu , Maonan Wang , Xi Xiong

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

Language model calibration refers to the alignment between the confidence of the model and the actual performance of its responses. While previous studies point out the overconfidence phenomenon in Large Language Models (LLMs) and show that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Jixuan Leng , Chengsong Huang , Banghua Zhu , Jiaxin Huang

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) aligns language models with human preferences but is computationally expensive. We explore two approaches that leverage human gaze modeling to enhance RLHF: (1) gaze-aware reward models and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-17 Karim Galliamov , Ivan Titov , Ilya Pershin

Faithfulness, expressiveness, and elegance is the constant pursuit in machine translation. However, traditional metrics like \textit{BLEU} do not strictly align with human preference of translation quality. In this paper, we explore…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-28 Nuo Xu , Jun Zhao , Can Zu , Sixian Li , Lu Chen , Zhihao Zhang , Rui Zheng , Shihan Dou , Wenjuan Qin , Tao Gui , Qi Zhang , Xuanjing Huang

We provide a theoretical framework for Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF). Our analysis shows that when the true reward function is linear, the widely used maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) converges under both the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-09 Banghua Zhu , Jiantao Jiao , Michael I. Jordan

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…

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has evolved to be one of the main methods for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs). However, existing RLHF methods are non-robust, and their performance deteriorates if the downstream…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Debmalya Mandal , Paulius Sasnauskas , Goran Radanovic

This work tackles the problem of overoptimization in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), a prevalent technique for aligning models with human preferences. RLHF relies on reward or preference models trained on \emph{fixed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Dhawal Gupta , Adam Fisch , Christoph Dann , Alekh Agarwal

Text classification models are typically trained via supervised fine-tuning (SFT). However, SFT essentially performs behavior cloning from instance-wise labels and thus fails to adequately capture relative preference relations among…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Tianxiang Xu , Xiaoyan Zhu , Xin Lai , Jiayin Wang