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Iterative Data Smoothing: Mitigating Reward Overfitting and Overoptimization in RLHF

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arxiv 2401.16335 v1 pith:T46AK3IH submitted 2024-01-29 cs.LG cs.AIcs.CLstat.ML

Iterative Data Smoothing: Mitigating Reward Overfitting and Overoptimization in RLHF

classification cs.LG cs.AIcs.CLstat.ML
keywords modelrewarddatalearningrlhfepochhumaniterative
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a pivotal technique that aligns language models closely with human-centric values. The initial phase of RLHF involves learning human values using a reward model from ranking data. It is observed that the performance of the reward model degrades after one epoch of training, and optimizing too much against the learned reward model eventually hinders the true objective. This paper delves into these issues, leveraging the theoretical insights to design improved reward learning algorithm termed 'Iterative Data Smoothing' (IDS). The core idea is that during each training epoch, we not only update the model with the data, but also update the date using the model, replacing hard labels with soft labels. Our empirical findings highlight the superior performance of this approach over the traditional methods.

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Cited by 5 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

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    PBSD derives a reward-reweighted teacher distribution as the analytic optimum of a reward-regularized objective, yielding better stability and performance than KL-based self-distillation on math reasoning and tool-use tasks.

  2. Response Time Enhances Alignment with Heterogeneous Preferences

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Response times modeled as drift-diffusion processes enable consistent estimation of population-average preferences from heterogeneous anonymous binary choices.

  3. OPRIDE: Offline Preference-based Reinforcement Learning via In-Dataset Exploration

    cs.LG 2026-02 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    OPRIDE improves query efficiency in offline PbRL via a principled in-dataset exploration strategy and discount scheduling, outperforming prior methods with fewer queries and providing theoretical guarantees.

  4. RLBFF: Binary Flexible Feedback to bridge between Human Feedback & Verifiable Rewards

    cs.CL 2025-09 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    RLBFF extracts binary principles from human feedback to train reward models that outperform Bradley-Terry models on RM-Bench and JudgeBench and enable customizable inference-time focus for LLM alignment.

  5. RewardBench 2: Advancing Reward Model Evaluation

    cs.CL 2025-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    RewardBench 2 is a new benchmark that supplies challenging fresh human prompts for reward model evaluation, yielding lower average scores but higher correlation with downstream best-of-N sampling and RLHF training per...