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Training multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) that align with human intentions is a long-term challenge. Traditional score-only reward models for alignment suffer from low accuracy, weak generalization, and poor interpretability,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Jiayi Zhou , Jiaming Ji , Boyuan Chen , Jiapeng Sun , Wenqi Chen , Donghai Hong , Sirui Han , Yike Guo , Yaodong Yang

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has been crucial to the recent success of Large Language Models (LLMs), however, it is often a complex and brittle process. In the classical RLHF framework, a reward model is first trained…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-06 Rafael Rafailov , Yaswanth Chittepu , Ryan Park , Harshit Sikchi , Joey Hejna , Bradley Knox , Chelsea Finn , Scott Niekum

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) allows us to train models, such as language models (LMs), to follow complex human preferences. In RLHF for LMs, we first train an LM using supervised fine-tuning, sample pairs of responses,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Johannes Ackermann , Takashi Ishida , Masashi Sugiyama

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

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is crucial for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human values. However, RLHF has been continuously challenged by its high complexity in implementation and computation consumption,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Yuhao Du , Zhuo Li , Pengyu Cheng , Zhihong Chen , Yuejiao Xie , Xiang Wan , Anningzhe Gao

Reinforcement learning has seen wide success in finetuning large language models to better align with instructions via human feedback. The so-called algorithm, Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) demonstrates impressive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-02-13 Tianjun Zhang , Fangchen Liu , Justin Wong , Pieter Abbeel , Joseph E. Gonzalez

Rewards serve as proxies for human preferences and play a crucial role in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). However, if these rewards are inherently imperfect, exhibiting various biases, they can adversely affect the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Sheng Ouyang , Yulan Hu , Ge Chen , Qingyang Li , Fuzheng Zhang , Yong Liu

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a central framework for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. Despite its practical success, RLHF raises fundamental statistical questions because it…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-06 Pangpang Liu , Chengchun Shi , Will Wei Sun

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has been widely adopted to align language models (LMs) with human preference. Prior RLHF works typically take a bandit formulation, which, though intuitive, ignores the sequential nature of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-07 Yueqin Yin , Shentao Yang , Yujia Xie , Ziyi Yang , Yuting Sun , Hany Awadalla , Weizhu Chen , Mingyuan Zhou

Recent advances in machine learning have shown that Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) can improve machine learning models and align them with human preferences. Although very successful for Large Language Models (LLMs),…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Katie Z Luo , Zhenzhen Liu , Xiangyu Chen , Yurong You , Sagie Benaim , Cheng Perng Phoo , Mark Campbell , Wen Sun , Bharath Hariharan , Kilian Q. Weinberger

We show that reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) can elicit strong mathematical reasoning in certain language models even with spurious rewards that have little, no, or even negative correlation with the correct answer.…

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) plays a crucial role in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values and preferences. However, the quality and stability of the trained reward model largely determine the final…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-17 Chunjin Jian , Xinhua Zhu

Mathematical reasoning is a central challenge for large language models (LLMs), requiring not only correct answers but also faithful reasoning processes. Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a promising…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Md Tanvirul Alam , Nidhi Rastogi

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for downstream tasks typically exhibit a fundamental safety-capability tradeoff, where improving task performance degrades safety alignment even on benign datasets. This degradation persists across…

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has proven effective for complex reasoning tasks with clear correctness signals such as math and coding. However, extending it to real-world reasoning tasks is challenging, as evaluation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Anisha Gunjal , Anthony Wang , Elaine Lau , Vaskar Nath , Yunzhong He , Bing Liu , Sean Hendryx

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences through reinforcement learning (RLHF) can lead to reward hacking, where LLMs exploit failures in the reward model (RM) to achieve seemingly high rewards without meeting the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-23 Alexandre Ramé , Nino Vieillard , Léonard Hussenot , Robert Dadashi , Geoffrey Cideron , Olivier Bachem , Johan Ferret

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has recently emerged as a powerful paradigm for facilitating the self-improvement of large language models (LLMs), particularly in the domain of complex reasoning tasks. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-17 Ziru Liu , Cheng Gong , Xinyu Fu , Yaofang Liu , Ran Chen , Shoubo Hu , Suiyun Zhang , Rui Liu , Qingfu Zhang , Dandan Tu

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

Recent work shows that preference alignment objectives can be interpreted as divergence estimators between aligned (preferred) & unaligned (less-preferred) distributions, yielding a principled recipe for designing alignment losses. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Rajdeep Haldar , Lantao Mei , Guang Lin , Yue Xing , Qifan Song

Existing alignment methods directly use the reward model learned from user preference data to optimize an LLM policy, subject to KL regularization with respect to the base policy. This practice is suboptimal for maximizing user's utility…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Haichuan Wang , Tao Lin , Lingkai Kong , Ce Li , Hezi Jiang , Milind Tambe