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Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a central framework for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. Despite its practical success, RLHF raises fundamental statistical questions because it…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-06 Pangpang Liu , Chengchun Shi , Will Wei Sun

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as the standard paradigm for aligning large language models with human preferences. However, reward-based methods grounded in the Bradley-Terry assumption struggle to capture the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Fang Wu , Xu Huang , Weihao Xuan , Zhiwei Zhang , Yijia Xiao , Guancheng Wan , Xiaomin Li , Bing Hu , Peng Xia , Jure Leskovec , Yejin Choi

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

Despite the efficacy of Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) in aligning Large Language Models (LLMs), reward hacking remains a pivotal challenge. This issue emerges when LLMs excessively reduce the probability of rejected completions to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Chenxu Yang , Ruipeng Jia , Mingyu Zheng , Naibin Gu , Zheng Lin , Siyuan Chen , Weichong Yin , Hua Wu , Weiping Wang

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), particularly Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), has advanced LLM reasoning. However, GRPO suffers from three credit assignment failures: uniform token-level granularity that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Song Yu , Li Li , Wenwen Zhao , Zhisheng Yang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a cornerstone for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs), with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) serving as the de facto standard algorithm. Despite its ubiquity, we argue that the core ratio…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Penghui Qi , Xiangxin Zhou , Zichen Liu , Tianyu Pang , Chao Du , Min Lin , Wee Sun Lee

Self-evaluation, a model's ability to assess the correctness of its own output, is crucial for Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) to achieve self-improvement in multi-turn conversations, yet largely absent in foundation models. Recent work has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Wenkai Wang , Hongcan Guo , Zheqi Lv , Shengyu Zhang

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

We study Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) in settings where multiple labelers may strategically misreport feedback to steer the learned policy toward their own preferences. We show that existing RLHF algorithms, including…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Thomas Kleine Buening , Jiarui Gan , Debmalya Mandal , Marta Kwiatkowska

While Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has shown promise in aligning generative AI, we present empirical evidence that it can also cause severe, systematic misalignment. We hypothesize that this stems from evaluator…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Kaiqu Liang , Haimin Hu , Ryan Liu , Thomas L. Griffiths , Jaime Fernández Fisac

In this paper, we take a step towards a deeper understanding of learning from human preferences by systematically comparing the paradigm of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) with the recently proposed paradigm of direct…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Andi Nika , Debmalya Mandal , Parameswaran Kamalaruban , Georgios Tzannetos , Goran Radanović , Adish Singla

An increasing number of NLP applications interact with large language models (LLMs) through black-box APIs, making prompt engineering critical for controlling model outputs. While recent Automatic Prompt Optimization (APO) methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-15 MohammadReza Davari , Utkarsh Garg , Weixin Cai , Eugene Belilovsky

We present NPO, an alignment-aware learning framework that operationalizes feedback-driven adaptation in human-in-the-loop decision systems. Unlike prior approaches that treat alignment as a static or post-hoc property, NPO introduces a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-30 Madhava Gaikwad , Ashwini Ramchandra Doke

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

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) was introduced and used recently for promoting reasoning in LLMs under verifiable (binary) rewards. We show that the mean + variance calibration of these rewards induces a weighted contrastive loss…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Youssef Mroueh

Differentiable reinforcement learning (RL) frameworks like DiffRO offer a powerful approach for controllable text-to-speech (TTS), but are vulnerable to reward hacking, particularly for nuanced tasks like emotion control. The policy model…

Sound · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Cong Wang , Changfeng Gao , Yang Xiang , Zhihao Du , Keyu An , Han Zhao , Qian Chen , Xiangang Li , Yingming Gao , Ya Li

Accurately aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences is crucial for informing fair, economically sound, and statistically efficient decision-making processes. However, we argue that the predominant approach for aligning…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-08-26 Jiancong Xiao , Ziniu Li , Xingyu Xie , Emily Getzen , Cong Fang , Qi Long , Weijie J. Su

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is increasingly used to align large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, the effectiveness of RLHF in addressing underlying biases remains unclear. This study investigates…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-13 Logan Barnhart , Reza Akbarian Bafghi , Stephen Becker , Maziar Raissi

Direct alignment algorithms such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) fine-tune models based on preference data, using only supervised learning instead of two-stage reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF). We show that DPO…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Aditya Gopalan , Sayak Ray Chowdhury , Debangshu Banerjee

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