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Mitigating reward hacking--where AI systems misbehave due to flaws or misspecifications in their learning objectives--remains a key challenge in constructing capable and aligned models. We show that we can monitor a frontier reasoning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Bowen Baker , Joost Huizinga , Leo Gao , Zehao Dou , Melody Y. Guan , Aleksander Madry , Wojciech Zaremba , Jakub Pachocki , David Farhi

The problem of reinforcement learning is considered where the environment or the model undergoes a change. An algorithm is proposed that an agent can apply in such a problem to achieve the optimal long-time discounted reward. The algorithm…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-04-25 Wuxia Chen , Taposh Banerjee , Jemin George , Carl Busart

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

We explore a method for improving the performance of large language models through self-reflection and reinforcement learning. By incentivizing the model to generate better self-reflections when it answers incorrectly, we demonstrate that a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Shelly Bensal , Umar Jamil , Christopher Bryant , Melisa Russak , Kiran Kamble , Dmytro Mozolevskyi , Muayad Ali , Waseem AlShikh

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is crucial for aligning large language models with human preferences. While recent research has focused on algorithmic improvements, the importance of prompt-data construction has been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-03 Wei Shen , Guanlin Liu , Zheng Wu , Ruofei Zhu , Qingping Yang , Chao Xin , Yu Yue , Lin Yan

Reinforcement learning (RL) often struggles with reward misalignment, where agents optimize given rewards but fail to exhibit the desired behaviors. This arises when the reward function incentivizes proxy behaviors misaligned with the true…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Mohammad Saif Nazir , Chayan Banerjee

Reward design in reinforcement learning (RL) is challenging since specifying human notions of desired behavior may be difficult via reward functions or require many expert demonstrations. Can we instead cheaply design rewards using a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-02 Minae Kwon , Sang Michael Xie , Kalesha Bullard , Dorsa Sadigh

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is widely used for reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards, but it often suffers from advantage collapse: when all rollouts in a group receive the same reward, the group yields zero relative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Yu Xia , Canwen Xu , Zhewei Yao , Julian McAuley , Yuxiong He

Despite the success of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) in aligning language models with human values, reward hacking, also termed reward overoptimization, remains a critical challenge. This issue primarily arises from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-04 Yuchun Miao , Sen Zhang , Liang Ding , Rong Bao , Lefei Zhang , Dacheng Tao

Human-designed reward functions for reinforcement learning (RL) agents are frequently misaligned with the humans' true, unobservable objectives, and thus act only as proxies. Optimizing for a misspecified proxy reward function often induces…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Stephane Hatgis-Kessell , Logan Mondal Bhamidipaty , Emma Brunskill

Existing agents for solving tasks such as ML engineering rely on prompting powerful language models. As a result, these agents do not improve with more experience. In this paper, we show that agents backed by weaker models that improve via…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-04 Sherry Yang , Joy He-Yueya , Percy Liang

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback relies on reward models to align large language models with human preferences. However, RLHF often suffers from reward hacking, wherein policy learning exploits flaws in the trained reward model to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Kangwen Zhao , Jianfeng Cai , Jinhua Zhu , Ruopei Sun , Dongyun Xue , Wengang Zhou , Li Li , Houqiang Li

Finding meaningful and accurate dense rewards is a fundamental task in the field of reinforcement learning (RL) that enables agents to explore environments more efficiently. In traditional RL settings, agents learn optimal policies through…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Shuyuan Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become essential to the post-training of large language models (LLMs) for reasoning, agentic capabilities and alignment. Successful RL relies on sufficient exploration of diverse actions by the model during…

Finetuning language models with reinforcement learning (RL), e.g. from human feedback (HF), is a prominent method for alignment. But optimizing against a reward model can improve on reward while degrading performance in other areas, a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-14 Michael Noukhovitch , Samuel Lavoie , Florian Strub , Aaron Courville

Reinforcement learning has shown great promise in robotics thanks to its ability to develop efficient robotic control procedures through self-training. In particular, reinforcement learning has been successfully applied to solving the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-12 Pierre Aumjaud , David McAuliffe , Francisco Javier Rodríguez Lera , Philip Cardiff

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing, yet aligning these models with human values and preferences using RLHF remains a significant challenge. This challenge is characterized by various instabilities,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-20 Baolin Peng , Linfeng Song , Ye Tian , Lifeng Jin , Haitao Mi , Dong Yu

Games are challenging for Reinforcement Learning~(RL) agents due to their reward-sparsity, as rewards are only obtainable after long sequences of deliberate actions. Intrinsic Motivation~(IM) methods -- which introduce exploration rewards…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Leonardo Villalobos-Arias , Grant Forbes , Jianxun Wang , David L Roberts , Arnav Jhala

The correct specification of reward models is a well-known challenge in reinforcement learning. Hand-crafted reward functions often lead to inefficient or suboptimal policies and may not be aligned with user values. Reinforcement learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Muhan Lin , Shuyang Shi , Yue Guo , Behdad Chalaki , Vaishnav Tadiparthi , Ehsan Moradi Pari , Simon Stepputtis , Joseph Campbell , Katia Sycara

As LM agents gain the ability to execute actions on real computer systems, we need ways to not only prevent harmful actions at scale but also effectively remediate harm when prevention fails. We formalize a solution to this neglected…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Christy Li , Sky CH-Wang , Andi Peng , Andreea Bobu