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In this paper, we study the offline and online settings of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) with KL-regularization -- a widely used objective function in large language model alignment -- under the $\epsilon$ local…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Yulian Wu , Rushil Thareja , Praneeth Vepakomma , Francesco Orabona

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a reliable approach to aligning large language models (LLMs) to human preferences. Among the plethora of RLHF techniques, proximal policy optimization (PPO) is of the most…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-06 Banghua Zhu , Hiteshi Sharma , Felipe Vieira Frujeri , Shi Dong , Chenguang Zhu , Michael I. Jordan , Jiantao Jiao

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) aligns large language models (LLMs) by encouraging their generations to have high rewards, using a reward model trained on human preferences. To prevent the forgetting of pre-trained…

The Primal-Dual hybrid gradient (PDHG) method is a powerful optimization scheme that breaks complex problems into simple sub-steps. Unfortunately, PDHG methods require the user to choose stepsize parameters, and the speed of convergence is…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2015-03-25 Tom Goldstein , Min Li , Xiaoming Yuan , Ernie Esser , Richard Baraniuk

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) aligns Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences, yet the underlying reward signals they internalize remain hidden, posing a critical challenge for interpretability and safety.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Nyal Patel , Matthieu Bou , Arjun Jagota , Satyapriya Krishna , Sonali Parbhoo

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) aims to align language models (LMs) with human values by training reward models (RMs) on binary preferences and using these RMs to fine-tune the base LMs. Despite its importance, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-21 Manon Revel , Matteo Cargnelutti , Tyna Eloundou , Greg Leppert

We propose a new first-order primal-dual optimization framework for a convex optimization template with broad applications. Our optimization algorithms feature optimal convergence guarantees under a variety of common structure assumptions…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-02-23 Quoc Tran-Dinh , Olivier Fercoq , Volkan Cevher

We consider stochastic strongly-convex-strongly-concave (SCSC) saddle point (SP) problems which frequently arise in applications ranging from distributionally robust learning to game theory and fairness in machine learning. We focus on the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-07-17 Yassine Laguel , Necdet Serhat Aybat , Mert Gürbüzbalaban

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has been an effective technique for aligning AI systems with human values, with remarkable successes in fine-tuning large-language models recently. Most existing RLHF paradigms make the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Chanwoo Park , Mingyang Liu , Dingwen Kong , Kaiqing Zhang , Asuman Ozdaglar

We present a novel unified bilevel optimization-based framework, \textsf{PARL}, formulated to address the recently highlighted critical issue of policy alignment in reinforcement learning using utility or preference-based feedback. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-02 Souradip Chakraborty , Amrit Singh Bedi , Alec Koppel , Dinesh Manocha , Huazheng Wang , Mengdi Wang , Furong Huang

Reward models trained on human preference data have been proven to effectively align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human intent within the framework of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). However, current reward models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Rui Yang , Ruomeng Ding , Yong Lin , Huan Zhang , Tong Zhang

This paper addresses a new interpretation of the traditional optimization method in reinforcement learning (RL) as optimization problems using reverse Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, and derives a new optimization method using forward KL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-25 Taisuke Kobayashi

In the era of increasing privacy concerns and demand for personalized experiences, traditional Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) frameworks face significant challenges due to their reliance on centralized data. We introduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Flint Xiaofeng Fan , Cheston Tan , Yew-Soon Ong , Roger Wattenhofer , Wei-Tsang Ooi

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a popular paradigm for aligning models with human intent. Typically RLHF algorithms operate in two phases: first, use human preferences to learn a reward function and second,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-01 Joey Hejna , Rafael Rafailov , Harshit Sikchi , Chelsea Finn , Scott Niekum , W. Bradley Knox , Dorsa Sadigh

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and related alignment paradigms have become central to steering large language models (LLMs) and multimodal large language models (MLLMs) toward human-preferred behaviors. However, these…

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

We propose a modified primal-dual method for general convex optimization problems with changing constraints. We obtain properties of Lagrangian saddle points for these problems which enable us to establish convergence of the proposed…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-01-04 Igor Konnov

With the rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs), numerous Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) algorithms have been introduced to improve model safety and alignment with human preferences. These algorithms can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-06 Xuerui Su , Yue Wang , Jinhua Zhu , Mingyang Yi , Feng Xu , Zhiming Ma , Yuting Liu

We develop an inexact primal-dual first-order smoothing framework to solve a class of non-bilinear saddle point problems with primal strong convexity. Compared with existing methods, our framework yields a significant improvement over the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-07-25 Le Thi Khanh Hien , Renbo Zhao , William B. Haskell

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performances in various tasks. However, the performance of LLMs heavily depends on the input prompt, which has given rise to a number of recent works on prompt optimization. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Xiaoqiang Lin , Zhongxiang Dai , Arun Verma , See-Kiong Ng , Patrick Jaillet , Bryan Kian Hsiang Low