Lune

EMNLP Findings2024

Reward Modeling Requires Automatic Adjustment Based on Data Quality

Binghai Wang, Rui Zheng, Lu Chen, Zhiheng Xi, Wei Shen, Yuhao Zhou, Dong Yan, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang

Abstract

In Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), the reward model plays a crucial role in aligning language model outputs with human values. The human preference data used to train the reward model consists of a prompt and a response pair, with humans annotating which response better aligns with human value preferences. Due to the complexity and subjectivity of the annotation task, multiple organizations including OpenAI and Anthropic report significant noise in the human preference datasets, leading to instability and deviation in reward model training from human values. We discover that the difference in scores assigned to response pairs by the reward model effectively indicates the quality of data, and data of varying qualities show significant distinctions in reward model training. We introduce a method that automatically adjusts reward modeling based on data quality, reducing the impact of noise and making full use of dataset. Experiments on multiple human preference datasets demonstrate that our method stabilizes reward model training and significantly enhances the alignment performance of RLHF.

Ask Lune

Ask anything. The answer quotes the paper.

Lune reads all of it and the papers around it, then shows you the passages behind every answer.

Questions to start from

Lune answers from

the full paper · 8 top-tier papers that cite it · related work

Get the answer

Free to start. No credit card required.

Cited by top-tier papers8

  1. The Lighthouse of Language: Enhancing LLM Agents via Critique-Guided ImprovementRuihan Yang, Fanghua Ye, Jian Li, Siyu Yuan et al.NeurIPS 2025 · 21 citations
  2. Flattery, Fluff, and Fog: Diagnosing and Mitigating Idiosyncratic Biases in Preference ModelsAnirudh Bharadwaj, Chaitanya Malaviya, Nitish Joshi, Mark YatskarICLR 2026 · 15 citations
  3. Pre-Trained Policy Discriminators are General Reward ModelsShihan Dou, Shichun Liu, Yuming Yang, Yicheng Zou et al.NeurIPS 2025 · 13 citations
  4. Think-J: Learning to Think for Generative LLM-as-a-JudgeHui Huang, Yancheng He, Hongli Zhou, Rui Zhang et al.AAAI 2026 · 12 citations
  5. CoPL: Collaborative Preference Learning for Personalizing LLMsYoungbin Choi, Seunghyuk Cho, Minjong Lee, MoonJeong Park et al.EMNLP 2025

Builds on9

  1. Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackLong Ouyang, Jeffrey Wu, Xu Jiang, Diogo Almeida et al.NeurIPS 2022 · 24,707 citations
  2. LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language ModelsEdward J. Hu, Yelong Shen, Phillip Wallis, Zeyuan Allen-Zhu et al.ICLR 2022 · 18,833 citations
  3. The Curious Case of Neural Text DegenerationAri Holtzman, Jan Buys, Li Du, Maxwell Forbes et al.ICLR 2020 · 4,112 citations
  4. Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language ModelsMrinank Sharma, Meg Tong, Tomasz Korbak, David Duvenaud et al.ICLR 2024 · 762 citations
  5. Weak-to-Strong Generalization: Eliciting Strong Capabilities With Weak SupervisionCollin Burns, Pavel Izmailov, Jan Hendrik Kirchner, Bowen Baker et al.ICML 2024 · 443 citations

Related papers

  1. Reward Generalization in RLHF: A Topological PerspectiveTianyi Alex Qiu, Fanzhi Zeng, Jiaming Ji, Dong Yan et al.ACL Findings 2025
  2. RLTHF: Targeted Human Feedback for LLM AlignmentYifei Xu, Tusher Chakraborty, Emre Kiciman, Bibek Aryal et al.ICML 2025
  3. Personalizing Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback with Variational Preference LearningSriyash Poddar, Yanming Wan, Hamish Ivison, Abhishek Gupta et al.NeurIPS 2024 · 188 citations
  4. Active Reward Modeling: Adaptive Preference Labeling for Large Language Model AlignmentYunyi Shen, Hao Sun, Jean-Francois TonICML 2025
  5. Alignment Tampering: How Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback Is Exploited to Optimize Misaligned BiasesDongyoon Hahm, Dylan Hadfield-Menell, Kimin LeeICML 2026
Dusk over the sea between two cliffs drawn in fine vertical lines