English
Related papers

Related papers: Explaining and Preventing Alignment Collapse in It…

200 papers

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has achieved impressive empirical successes while relying on a small amount of human feedback. However, there is limited theoretical justification for this phenomenon. Additionally, most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Yihan Du , Anna Winnicki , Gal Dalal , Shie Mannor , R. Srikant

Traditional RL algorithms like Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) typically train on the entire rollout buffer, operating under the assumption that all generated episodes provide a beneficial optimization signal. However, these episodes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Dong Shu , Denghui Zhang , Jessica Hullman

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has been positioned by recent literature as the canonical method for the RL part of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). PPO performs well empirically but has a heuristic motivation and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Dipan Maity

Aligning large language models (LLM) with human preference plays a key role in building modern generative models and can be achieved by reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Despite their superior performance, current RLHF…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-12 Kaixuan Ji , Jiafan He , Quanquan Gu

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in solving complex mathematical problems, yet they still fall short of producing accurate and consistent solutions. Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a framework for aligning these models with…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Ali Hatamizadeh , Shrimai Prabhumoye , Igor Gitman , Ximing Lu , Seungju Han , Wei Ping , Yejin Choi , Jan Kautz

Reward-based alignment methods for large language models (LLMs) face two key limitations: vulnerability to reward hacking, where models exploit flaws in the reward signal; and reliance on brittle, labor-intensive prompt engineering when…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Zae Myung Kim , Chanwoo Park , Vipul Raheja , Suin Kim , Dongyeop Kang

Recent work shows that preference alignment objectives can be interpreted as divergence estimators between aligned (preferred) & unaligned (less-preferred) distributions, yielding a principled recipe for designing alignment losses. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Rajdeep Haldar , Lantao Mei , Guang Lin , Yue Xing , Qifan Song

Reinforcement learning (RL) is effective in enhancing the accuracy of large language models in complex reasoning tasks. Existing RL policy optimization frameworks rely on final-answer correctness as feedback signals and rarely capture the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Jinghan Zhang , Fengran Mo , Tharindu Cyril Weerasooriya , Ruimin Dai , Xiaoyan Han , Yanjie Fu , Dakuo Wang , Kunpeng Liu

Reinforcement learning with verifiable reward has recently emerged as a central paradigm for post-training large language models (LLMs); however, prevailing mean-based methods, such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), suffer from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Tao Ren , Jinyang Jiang , Hui Yang , Wan Tian , Minhao Zou , Guanghao Li , Zishi Zhang , Qinghao Wang , Shentao Qin , Yanjun Zhao , Rui Tao , Hui Shao , Yijie Peng

Reinforcement learning has become a central paradigm for improving LLM reasoning. However, existing methods use a single policy to produce both inference responses and training optimization trajectories. The objective conflict between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-26 Jingchu Wang , Bingbing Xu , Yige Yuan , Bin Xie , Xiaoqian Sun , Huawei Shen

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

Reward inference (learning a reward model from human preferences) is a critical intermediate step in the Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) pipeline for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs). In practice, RLHF faces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Qining Zhang , Lei Ying

While large language models demonstrate remarkable capabilities, they often present challenges in terms of safety, alignment with human values, and stability during training. Here, we focus on two prevalent methods used to align these…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-26 Gabriel Mukobi , Peter Chatain , Su Fong , Robert Windesheim , Gitta Kutyniok , Kush Bhatia , Silas Alberti

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is increasingly viewed as a tree pruning mechanism. However, we identify a systemic pathology termed Recursive Space Contraction (RSC), an irreversible collapse driven by the combined…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Tianyi Wang , Long Li , Hongcan Guo , Yibiao Chen , Yixia Li , Yong Wang , Yun Chen , Guanhua Chen

Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards has emerged as a powerful technique for enhancing the complex reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, these methods are fundamentally constrained by the ''learning cliff''…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Xichen Zhang , Sitong Wu , Yinghao Zhu , Haoru Tan , Shaozuo Yu , Ziyi He , Jiaya Jia

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has been commonly used to align the behaviors of Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences. Recently, a popular alternative is Direct Policy Optimization (DPO), which replaces an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-03 Runsheng Yu , Yong Wang , Xiaoqi Jiao , Youzhi Zhang , James T. Kwok

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become increasingly popular due to their ability to process and generate natural language. However, as they are trained on massive datasets of text, LLMs can inherit harmful biases and produce outputs that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-23 Qi Gou , Cam-Tu Nguyen

While direct policy optimization methods exist, pioneering LLMs are fine-tuned with reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to generate better responses under the supervision of a reward model learned from preference data. One…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Chuheng Zhang , Wei Shen , Li Zhao , Xuyun Zhang , Xiaolong Xu , Wanchun Dou , Jiang Bian

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a widely used method for aligning large language models with human preferences. However, RLHF often suffers from reward model overoptimisation, in which models overfit to the reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Lorenz Wolf , Robert Kirk , Mirco Musolesi

We introduce Stackelberg Learning from Human Feedback (SLHF), a new framework for preference optimization. SLHF frames the alignment problem as a sequential-move game between two policies: a Leader, which commits to an action, and a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Barna Pásztor , Thomas Kleine Buening , Andreas Krause