Iterative Data Smoothing: Mitigating Reward Overfitting and Overoptimization in RLHF

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Zhu, Banghua, Jordan, Michael I., Jiao, Jiantao
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Zhu, Banghua
Jordan, Michael I.
Jiao, Jiantao
author_facet Zhu, Banghua
Jordan, Michael I.
Jiao, Jiantao
contents 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.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_16335
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Iterative Data Smoothing: Mitigating Reward Overfitting and Overoptimization in RLHF
Zhu, Banghua
Jordan, Michael I.
Jiao, Jiantao
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
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.
title Iterative Data Smoothing: Mitigating Reward Overfitting and Overoptimization in RLHF
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.16335