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Main Authors: Shen, Wei, Liu, Guanlin, Wu, Zheng, Zhu, Ruofei, Yang, Qingping, Xin, Chao, Yue, Yu, Yan, Lin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.22230
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author Shen, Wei
Liu, Guanlin
Wu, Zheng
Zhu, Ruofei
Yang, Qingping
Xin, Chao
Yue, Yu
Yan, Lin
author_facet Shen, Wei
Liu, Guanlin
Wu, Zheng
Zhu, Ruofei
Yang, Qingping
Xin, Chao
Yue, Yu
Yan, Lin
contents Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is crucial for aligning large language models with human preferences. While recent research has focused on algorithmic improvements, the importance of prompt-data construction has been overlooked. This paper addresses this gap by exploring data-driven bottlenecks in RLHF performance scaling, particularly reward hacking and decreasing response diversity. We introduce a hybrid reward system combining reasoning task verifiers (RTV) and a generative reward model (GenRM) to mitigate reward hacking. We also propose a novel prompt-selection method, Pre-PPO, to maintain response diversity and enhance learning effectiveness. Additionally, we find that prioritizing mathematical and coding tasks early in RLHF training significantly improves performance. Experiments across two model sizes validate our methods' effectiveness and scalability. Results show that RTV is most resistant to reward hacking, followed by GenRM with ground truth, and then GenRM with SFT Best-of-N responses. Our strategies enable rapid capture of subtle task-specific distinctions, leading to substantial improvements in overall RLHF performance. This work highlights the importance of careful data construction and provides practical methods to overcome performance barriers in RLHF.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_22230
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Exploring Data Scaling Trends and Effects in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback
Shen, Wei
Liu, Guanlin
Wu, Zheng
Zhu, Ruofei
Yang, Qingping
Xin, Chao
Yue, Yu
Yan, Lin
Machine Learning
Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is crucial for aligning large language models with human preferences. While recent research has focused on algorithmic improvements, the importance of prompt-data construction has been overlooked. This paper addresses this gap by exploring data-driven bottlenecks in RLHF performance scaling, particularly reward hacking and decreasing response diversity. We introduce a hybrid reward system combining reasoning task verifiers (RTV) and a generative reward model (GenRM) to mitigate reward hacking. We also propose a novel prompt-selection method, Pre-PPO, to maintain response diversity and enhance learning effectiveness. Additionally, we find that prioritizing mathematical and coding tasks early in RLHF training significantly improves performance. Experiments across two model sizes validate our methods' effectiveness and scalability. Results show that RTV is most resistant to reward hacking, followed by GenRM with ground truth, and then GenRM with SFT Best-of-N responses. Our strategies enable rapid capture of subtle task-specific distinctions, leading to substantial improvements in overall RLHF performance. This work highlights the importance of careful data construction and provides practical methods to overcome performance barriers in RLHF.
title Exploring Data Scaling Trends and Effects in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.22230