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Related papers: Mitigating Reward Hacking in RLHF via Advantage Si…

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The Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) plays a pivotal role in shaping the impact of large language models (LLMs), contributing significantly to controlling output toxicity and selecting output styles, particularly as LLMs…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-08-11 Miao Fan , Chen Hu , Shuchang Zhou

We consider algorithms for learning reward functions from human preferences over pairs of trajectory segments, as used in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Most recent work assumes that human preferences are generated based…

We prove that under five minimal axioms -- multi-dimensional quality, finite evaluation, effective optimization, resource finiteness, and combinatorial interaction -- any optimized AI agent will systematically under-invest effort in quality…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Jiacheng Wang , Jinbin Huang

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) offers a promising approach to aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. Typically, a reward model is trained or supplied to act as a proxy for humans in evaluating…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Jiahui Li , Lin Li , Tai-wei Chang , Kun Kuang , Long Chen , Jun Zhou , Cheng Yang

The ability of reinforcement learning algorithms to learn effective policies is determined by the rewards available during training. However, for practical problems, obtaining large quantities of reward labels is often infeasible due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Shreyas Chaudhari , Renhao Zhang , Philip S. Thomas , Bruno Castro da Silva

Reward function is essential in reinforcement learning (RL), serving as the guiding signal to incentivize agents to solve given tasks, however, is also notoriously difficult to design. In many cases, only imperfect rewards are available,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-06 Jianxiong Li , Xiao Hu , Haoran Xu , Jingjing Liu , Xianyuan Zhan , Qing-Shan Jia , Ya-Qin Zhang

To design rewards that align with human goals, Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a prominent technique for learning reward functions from human preferences and optimizing policies via reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Taehyun Cho , Seokhun Ju , Seungyub Han , Dohyeong Kim , Kyungjae Lee , Jungwoo Lee

Aligning autonomous agents with human intent remains a central challenge in modern AI. A key manifestation of this challenge is reward hacking, whereby agents appear successful under the evaluation signal while violating the intended…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Amit Roth , Ankur Samanta , Matan Halevy , Yoav Levine , Yonathan Efroni

In practice, reinforcement learning (RL) agents are often trained with a possibly imperfect proxy reward function, which may lead to a human-agent alignment issue (i.e., the learned policy either converges to non-optimal performance with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Zhaohui Jiang , Xuening Feng , Paul Weng , Yifei Zhu , Yan Song , Tianze Zhou , Yujing Hu , Tangjie Lv , Changjie Fan

As large language models increasingly drive real-world applications, aligning them with human values becomes paramount. Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a key technique, translating preference data into…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-07 Yunzhen Feng , Ariel Kwiatkowski , Kunhao Zheng , Julia Kempe , Yaqi Duan

While current emotional support dialogue systems typically rely on expert-defined scalar rewards for alignment, these signals suffer from severe information sparsity. They cannot explain why a response failed or how to adapt to dynamic user…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Jing Ye , Xinpei Zhao , Lu Xiang , Yaping Zhang , Chengqing Zong

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful tool for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) to improve complex reasoning abilities. However, state-of-the-art policy optimization methods often suffer from high computational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Kianté Brantley , Mingyu Chen , Zhaolin Gao , Jason D. Lee , Wen Sun , Wenhao Zhan , Xuezhou Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) is increasingly used to align large language models (LLMs). Off-policy methods offer greater implementation simplicity and data efficiency than on-policy techniques, but often result in suboptimal performance. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Charles Arnal , Gaëtan Narozniak , Vivien Cabannes , Yunhao Tang , Julia Kempe , Remi Munos

Reinforcement learning (RL) is increasingly used to personalize instruction in intelligent tutoring systems, yet the field lacks a formal framework for defining and evaluating pedagogical safety. We introduce a four-layer model of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Oluseyi Olukola , Nick Rahimi

We show that when large language models learn to reward hack on production RL environments, this can result in egregious emergent misalignment. We start with a pretrained model, impart knowledge of reward hacking strategies via synthetic…

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a powerful technique to make large language models (LLMs) more capable in complex settings. RLHF proceeds as collecting human preference data, training a reward model on said…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-05 Nathan Lambert , Roberto Calandra

Hindsight experience replay (HER) accelerates off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms for environments that emit sparse rewards by modifying the goal of the episode post-hoc to be some state achieved during the episode. Because…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Douglas C. Crowder , Darrien M. McKenzie , Matthew L. Trappett , Frances S. Chance

Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate plausible code, but in settings that require exact stdin/stdout behavior they frequently produce programs that compile yet fail tests, and in some cases they introduce security-sensitive patterns.…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Suryansh Singh Sijwali , Suman Saha

Preference learning is a key technology for aligning language models with human values. Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a model-based algorithm to optimize preference learning, which first fits a reward model for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-26 Zaifan Jiang , Xing Huang , Chao Wei

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a promising solution to align large language models (LLMs) more closely with human values. Off-policy preference optimization, where the preference data is obtained from other models, is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-07 Wenxuan Zhou , Ravi Agrawal , Shujian Zhang , Sathish Reddy Indurthi , Sanqiang Zhao , Kaiqiang Song , Silei Xu , Chenguang Zhu