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Main Authors: Zhang, Xiaoying, Ton, Jean-Francois, Shen, Wei, Wang, Hongning, Liu, Yang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.05171
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author Zhang, Xiaoying
Ton, Jean-Francois
Shen, Wei
Wang, Hongning
Liu, Yang
author_facet Zhang, Xiaoying
Ton, Jean-Francois
Shen, Wei
Wang, Hongning
Liu, Yang
contents We introduce Adversarial Policy Optimization (AdvPO), a novel solution to the pervasive issue of reward over-optimization in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) for Large Language Models (LLMs). Over-optimization occurs when a reward model serves as an imperfect proxy for human preference, and RL-driven policy optimization erroneously exploits reward inaccuracies. In this paper, we begin by introducing a lightweight way to quantify uncertainties in rewards, relying solely on the last layer embeddings of the reward model, without the need for computationally expensive reward ensembles. AdvPO then addresses a distributionally robust optimization problem centred around the confidence interval of the reward model's predictions for policy improvement. Through comprehensive experiments on the Anthropic HH and TL;DR summarization datasets, we illustrate the efficacy of AdvPO in mitigating the overoptimization issue, consequently resulting in enhanced performance as evaluated through human-assisted evaluation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_05171
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Overcoming Reward Overoptimization via Adversarial Policy Optimization with Lightweight Uncertainty Estimation
Zhang, Xiaoying
Ton, Jean-Francois
Shen, Wei
Wang, Hongning
Liu, Yang
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
We introduce Adversarial Policy Optimization (AdvPO), a novel solution to the pervasive issue of reward over-optimization in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) for Large Language Models (LLMs). Over-optimization occurs when a reward model serves as an imperfect proxy for human preference, and RL-driven policy optimization erroneously exploits reward inaccuracies. In this paper, we begin by introducing a lightweight way to quantify uncertainties in rewards, relying solely on the last layer embeddings of the reward model, without the need for computationally expensive reward ensembles. AdvPO then addresses a distributionally robust optimization problem centred around the confidence interval of the reward model's predictions for policy improvement. Through comprehensive experiments on the Anthropic HH and TL;DR summarization datasets, we illustrate the efficacy of AdvPO in mitigating the overoptimization issue, consequently resulting in enhanced performance as evaluated through human-assisted evaluation.
title Overcoming Reward Overoptimization via Adversarial Policy Optimization with Lightweight Uncertainty Estimation
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.05171