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Main Authors: Shashidhar, Sarvesh, Mishra, Abhishek, Kotecha, Madhav
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.20760
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author Shashidhar, Sarvesh
Mishra, Abhishek
Kotecha, Madhav
author_facet Shashidhar, Sarvesh
Mishra, Abhishek
Kotecha, Madhav
contents Re-inforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has been effective in the task of AI alignment. However, one of the key assumptions of RLHF is that the annotators (referred to as workers from here on out) have a homogeneous response space. This assumption is not true in most practical settings and there have been studies done in the past to challenge this notion. This work has been inspired by such studies and explores one of the ways to deal with heterogeneity in worker preferences - by clustering workers with similar preferences and personalising reward models for each cluster. This work provides an algorithm that encourages simultaneous learning of reward models and worker embeddings. This algorithm is then empirically tested against the Reddit TL;DR dataset with unique worker IDs. We have shown that clustering users into different groups based on their preferences and created personalised reward models improves win-rate of the said models. Along with results and visualisations, this work aims to act as a stepping stone to more complicated models and gives a list of possible future extensions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_20760
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Exploring Re-inforcement Learning via Human Feedback under User Heterogeneity
Shashidhar, Sarvesh
Mishra, Abhishek
Kotecha, Madhav
Human-Computer Interaction
Re-inforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has been effective in the task of AI alignment. However, one of the key assumptions of RLHF is that the annotators (referred to as workers from here on out) have a homogeneous response space. This assumption is not true in most practical settings and there have been studies done in the past to challenge this notion. This work has been inspired by such studies and explores one of the ways to deal with heterogeneity in worker preferences - by clustering workers with similar preferences and personalising reward models for each cluster. This work provides an algorithm that encourages simultaneous learning of reward models and worker embeddings. This algorithm is then empirically tested against the Reddit TL;DR dataset with unique worker IDs. We have shown that clustering users into different groups based on their preferences and created personalised reward models improves win-rate of the said models. Along with results and visualisations, this work aims to act as a stepping stone to more complicated models and gives a list of possible future extensions.
title Exploring Re-inforcement Learning via Human Feedback under User Heterogeneity
topic Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.20760