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Modern large language models (LLMs) are increasingly fine-tuned via reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) or related reward optimisation schemes. While such procedures improve perceived helpfulness, we investigate whether…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Subramanyam Sahoo

Reinforcement learning, which acquires a policy maximizing long-term rewards, has been actively studied. Unfortunately, this learning type is too slow and difficult to use in practical situations because the state-action space becomes huge…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Takato Okudo , Seiji Yamada

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in fields like robotics and autonomous driving, but adversarial attacks designed to mislead RL systems remain challenging. Existing approaches often rely on modifying the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Junyong Jiang , Buwei Tian , Chenxing Xu , Songze Li , Lu Dong

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly trusted as automated judges, assisting evaluation and providing reward signals for training other models, particularly in reference-based settings like Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Yulai Zhao , Haolin Liu , Dian Yu , Sunyuan Kung , Meijia Chen , Haitao Mi , Dong Yu

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

Previous work has shown that training "helpful-only" LLMs with reinforcement learning on a curriculum of gameable environments can lead models to generalize to egregious specification gaming, such as editing their own reward function or…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Leo McKee-Reid , Christoph Sträter , Maria Angelica Martinez , Joe Needham , Mikita Balesni

The reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have improved substantially through increased test-time computation, typically in the form of intermediate tokens known as chain-of-thought (CoT). However, CoT often becomes…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Nathanaël Carraz Rakotonirina , Ren Pang , Neha Anna John , Michael Bohlke-Schneider , Momchil Hardalov

We seek to align agent behavior with a user's objectives in a reinforcement learning setting with unknown dynamics, an unknown reward function, and unknown unsafe states. The user knows the rewards and unsafe states, but querying the user…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2021-03-26 Siddharth Reddy , Anca D. Dragan , Sergey Levine , Shane Legg , Jan Leike

Safety risks of AI models have been widely studied at deployment time, such as jailbreak attacks that elicit harmful outputs. In contrast, safety risks emerging during training remain largely unexplored. Beyond explicit reward hacking that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Zhexin Zhang , Yida Lu , Junfeng Fang , Junxiao Yang , Shiyao Cui , Hao Zhou , Fandong Meng , Jie Zhou , Hongning Wang , Minlie Huang , Tat-Seng Chua

Standard reinforcement learning (RL) for large language model (LLM) agents typically optimizes extrinsic rewards, prioritizing isolated task completion over continual adaptation. Consequently, agents often converge to suboptimal policies…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Xiaoying Zhang , Zichen Liu , Yipeng Zhang , Xia Hu , Wenqi Shao

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is the standard method to align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences. In this work, we introduce alignment tampering, a potential vulnerability where the LLM undergoing…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Dongyoon Hahm , Dylan Hadfield-Menell , Kimin Lee

Through reinforcement learning (RL) with outcome correctness rewards, large reasoning models (LRMs) with scaled inference computation have demonstrated substantial success on complex reasoning tasks. However, the one-sided reward, focused…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-21 Jiashu Yao , Heyan Huang , Shuang Zeng , Chuwei Luo , WangJie You , Jie Tang , Qingsong Liu , Yuhang Guo , Yangyang Kang

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is essential for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values. However, RLHF is susceptible to \emph{reward hacking}, where the agent exploits flaws in the reward function rather…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-22 Jiayi Fu , Xuandong Zhao , Chengyuan Yao , Heng Wang , Qi Han , Yanghua Xiao

LLM agents increasingly perform end-to-end ML engineering tasks where success is judged by a single scalar test metric. This creates a structural vulnerability: an agent can increase the reported score by compromising the evaluation…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Yonas Atinafu , Robin Cohen

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has proven highly effective in aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences. Typical RL methods optimize under an overall sequence reward, which can lead to a suboptimal learning process. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Yanshi Li , Shaopan Xiong , Gengru Chen , Xiaoyang Li , Yijia Luo , Xingyuan Bu , Yingshui Tan , Wenbo Su , Bo Zheng

Reward design remains a critical bottleneck in visual reinforcement learning (RL) for robotic manipulation. In simulated environments, rewards are conventionally designed based on the distance to a target position. However, such precise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Nan Tang , Jing-Cheng Pang , Guanlin Li , Chao Qian , Yang Yu

Backdoor attacks on reinforcement learning implant a backdoor in a victim agent's policy. Once the victim observes the trigger signal, it will switch to the abnormal mode and fail its task. Most of the attacks assume the adversary can…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Shuo Chen , Yue Qiu , Jie Zhang

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have led to their increased application across various tasks, with reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) being a crucial part of their training to align responses with user…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Ben Hauptvogel , Malte Ostendorff , Georg Rehm , Sebastian Möller

Mathematical reasoning is a key benchmark for large language models. Reinforcement learning is a standard post-training mechanism for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models, yet performance remains sensitive to the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Arash Ahmadi , Sarah Sharif , Yaser , Banad

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as an effective approach to aligning large language models (LLMs) to human preferences. RLHF contains three steps, i.e., human preference collecting, reward learning, and policy…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-29 Hao Lang , Fei Huang , Yongbin Li