English
Related papers

Related papers: SAFE: Stable Alignment Finetuning with Entropy-Awa…

200 papers

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) often suffers from noisy or imperfect reward supervision in real-world settings, which undermines policy stability and generalization. Such noise may cause models to lose attention on key…

Reinforcement Learning, particularly through policy gradient methods, has played a central role in enabling reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models. However, the optimization stability of policy gradients in this setting remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Luckeciano C. Melo , Alessandro Abate , Yarin Gal

In this paper, we explore how directly pretraining a value model simplifies and stabilizes reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). In reinforcement learning, value estimation is the key to policy optimization, distinct from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Chenghua Huang , Lu Wang , Fangkai Yang , Pu Zhao , Zhixu Li , Qingwei Lin , Dongmei Zhang , Saravan Rajmohan , Qi Zhang

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) excels in various control tasks, yet the absence of safety guarantees hampers its real-world applicability. In particular, explorations during learning usually results in safety violations, while the RL…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Yifan Sun , Feihan Li , Weiye Zhao , Rui Chen , Tianhao Wei , Changliu Liu

Safety and trustworthiness are indispensable requirements for real-world applications of AI systems using large language models (LLMs). This paper formulates human value alignment as an optimization problem of the language model policy to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Akifumi Wachi , Thien Q. Tran , Rei Sato , Takumi Tanabe , Youhei Akimoto

Autonomous driving has attracted great interest due to its potential capability in full-unsupervised driving. Model-based and learning-based methods are widely used in autonomous driving. Model-based methods rely on pre-defined models of…

This work proposes `PET', a novel pessimistic reward fine-tuning method, to learn a pessimistic reward model robust against reward hacking in offline reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Traditional reward modeling techniques…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Yinglun Xu , Hangoo Kang , Tarun Suresh , Yuxuan Wan , Gagandeep Singh

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, it is important to ensure their behaviors align with human values, societal norms, and ethical principles. However, safety alignment under Reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Yifan Niu , Han Xiao , Dongyi Liu , Nuo Chen , Jia Li

This work identifies the Energy Loss Phenomenon in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and its connection to reward hacking. Specifically, energy loss in the final layer of a Large Language Model (LLM) gradually increases…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Yuchun Miao , Sen Zhang , Liang Ding , Yuqi Zhang , Lefei Zhang , Dacheng Tao

Constrained Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to maximize the return while adhering to predefined constraint limits, which represent domain-specific safety requirements. In continuous control settings, where learning agents govern system…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Somnath Hazra , Pallab Dasgupta , Soumyajit Dey

In Large Language Model (LLM) development, Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is crucial for aligning models with human values and preferences. RLHF traditionally relies on the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Atoosa Chegini , Hamid Kazemi , Iman Mirzadeh , Dong Yin , Maxwell Horton , Moin Nabi , Mehrdad Farajtabar , Keivan Alizadeh

In safe reinforcement learning (SRL) problems, an agent explores the environment to maximize an expected total reward and meanwhile avoids violation of certain constraints on a number of expected total costs. In general, such SRL problems…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-01 Tengyu Xu , Yingbin Liang , Guanghui Lan

Safe reinforcement learning is extremely challenging--not only must the agent explore an unknown environment, it must do so while ensuring no safety constraint violations. We formulate this safe reinforcement learning (RL) problem using the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-19 Archana Bura , Aria HasanzadeZonuzy , Dileep Kalathil , Srinivas Shakkottai , Jean-Francois Chamberland

The safety alignment of large language models (LLMs) often relies on reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), which requires human annotations to construct preference datasets. Given the challenge of assigning overall quality…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Xiaomin Li , Xupeng Chen , Jingxuan Fan , Eric Hanchen Jiang , Mingye Gao

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as an effective approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), especially in scenarios where supervised fine-tuning (SFT) falls short due to limited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Jian Xiong , Jingbo Zhou , Jingyong Ye , Qiang Huang , Dejing Dou

In this paper, we tackle the challenging problem of delayed rewards in reinforcement learning (RL). While Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has emerged as a leading Policy Gradient method, its performance can degrade under delayed rewards.…

Asynchronous reinforcement learning has become increasingly central to scaling LLM post-training, delivering major throughput gains by decoupling rollout generation from policy updates. However, widely used policy-gradient objectives such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Luke J. Huang , Zhuoyang Zhang , Qinghao Hu , Shang Yang , Song Han

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

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback~(RLHF) plays a crucial role in aligning Large Language Models~(LLMs). The dominant algorithm, Proximal Policy Optimization~(PPO), employs a critic network to estimate advantages, which introduces…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Jian Hu , Jason Klein Liu , Haotian Xu , Wei Shen

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