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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

Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a key paradigm for task-specific fine-tuning of language models using human preference data. While numerous publicly available preference datasets provide pairwise comparisons…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Ashwin Kumar , Yuzi He , Aram H. Markosyan , Bobbie Chern , Imanol Arrieta-Ibarra

Vision-language generative reward models (VL-GenRMs) play a crucial role in aligning and evaluating multimodal AI systems, yet their own evaluation remains under-explored. Current assessment methods primarily rely on AI-annotated preference…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Lei Li , Yuancheng Wei , Zhihui Xie , Xuqing Yang , Yifan Song , Peiyi Wang , Chenxin An , Tianyu Liu , Sujian Li , Bill Yuchen Lin , Lingpeng Kong , Qi Liu

Reward engineering has long been a challenge in Reinforcement Learning (RL) research, as it often requires extensive human effort and iterative processes of trial-and-error to design effective reward functions. In this paper, we propose…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Yufei Wang , Zhanyi Sun , Jesse Zhang , Zhou Xian , Erdem Biyik , David Held , Zackory Erickson

Reinforcement learning (RL) can align language models with non-differentiable reward signals, such as human preferences. However, a major challenge arises from the sparsity of these reward signals - typically, there is only a single reward…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Meng Cao , Lei Shu , Lei Yu , Yun Zhu , Nevan Wichers , Yinxiao Liu , Lei Meng

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

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

Conveying complex objectives to reinforcement learning (RL) agents often requires meticulous reward engineering. Preference-based RL methods are able to learn a more flexible reward model based on human preferences by actively incorporating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-26 Xinran Liang , Katherine Shu , Kimin Lee , Pieter Abbeel

We present the workflow of Online Iterative Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) in this technical report, which is widely reported to outperform its offline counterpart by a large margin in the recent large language model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-13 Hanze Dong , Wei Xiong , Bo Pang , Haoxiang Wang , Han Zhao , Yingbo Zhou , Nan Jiang , Doyen Sahoo , Caiming Xiong , Tong Zhang

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is an effective approach for aligning language models to human preferences. Central to RLHF is learning a reward function for scoring human preferences. Two main approaches for learning a…

The growing deployment of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) calls for a deeper theoretical investigation of its underlying models. The prevalent models of RLHF do not account for neuroscience-backed, partially-observed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Chinmaya Kausik , Mirco Mutti , Aldo Pacchiano , Ambuj Tewari

A common and effective strategy for humans to improve an unsatisfactory outcome in daily life is to find a cause of this outcome and correct the cause. In this paper, we investigate whether this human improvement strategy can be applied to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-17 Shicheng Liu , Siyuan Xu , Wenjie Qiu , Hangfan Zhang , Minghui Zhu

Reward model (RM) plays a pivotal role in reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) for aligning large language models (LLMs). However, classical RMs trained on human preferences are vulnerable to reward hacking and generalize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Zhenghao Xu , Qin Lu , Qingru Zhang , Liang Qiu , Ilgee Hong , Changlong Yu , Wenlin Yao , Yao Liu , Haoming Jiang , Lihong Li , Hyokun Yun , Tuo Zhao

Reward models play a critical role in guiding large language models toward outputs that align with human expectations. However, an open challenge remains in effectively utilizing test-time compute to enhance reward model performance. In…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Jiaxin Guo , Zewen Chi , Li Dong , Qingxiu Dong , Xun Wu , Shaohan Huang , Furu Wei

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) assumes annotator preferences reflect stable internal states. We challenge this through three experiments spanning the preference pipeline. In a human choice blindness study, 91% of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Wenbin Wu

In classical Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), Reward Models (RMs) serve as the fundamental signal provider for model alignment. As Large Language Models evolve into agentic systems capable of autonomous tool invocation and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Jiaxuan Wang , Yulan Hu , Wenjin Yang , Zheng Pan , Xin Li , Lan-Zhe Guo

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a pivotal technique for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences, yet it is susceptible to reward overoptimization, in which policy models overfit to the reward model,…

Recent progress in strengthening the capabilities of large language models has stemmed from applying reinforcement learning to domains with automatically verifiable outcomes. A key question is whether we can similarly use RL to optimize for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Eric Zhao , Jessica Dai , Pranjal Awasthi

The reward model has become increasingly important in alignment, assessment, and data construction for large language models (LLMs). Most existing researchers focus on enhancing reward models through data improvements, following the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-09 Shujun Liu , Xiaoyu Shen , Yuhang Lai , Siyuan Wang , Shengbin Yue , Zengfeng Huang , Xuanjing Huang , Zhongyu Wei

Reward learning enables the application of reinforcement learning (RL) to tasks where reward is defined by human judgment, building a model of reward by asking humans questions. Most work on reward learning has used simulated environments,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-01-10 Daniel M. Ziegler , Nisan Stiennon , Jeffrey Wu , Tom B. Brown , Alec Radford , Dario Amodei , Paul Christiano , Geoffrey Irving