Then it fine-tunes the LLM to maximize the learned reward using RL techniques.

With the advent of large language models (LLMs), reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a pivotal technological paradigm to align models' behaviors with human values [

Modeling the human as Boltzmann-rational w.r.t. a belief over trajectories, we prove conditions under which RLHF is

Ideally, we would like methods that train LMs only once ( i.e., one-shot) with a fixed objective, as in

We provide theoretical insights that support our method's alignment with standard preference alignment objectives.

However, if error is heavy-tailed, some policies obtain arbitrarily high reward despite achieving no more utility than the base model-a phenomenon we call catastrophic Goodhart. We adapt a discrete optimization method to measure the tails of reward models, finding that they are consistent with light-tailed error.

Despite the success of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) in aligning language models with human values, reward hacking, also termed reward overoptimization, remains a critical challenge. This issue primarily arises from reward misgeneralization, where reward models (RMs) compute reward using spurious features that are irrelevant to human preferences. In this work, we tackle this problem from an information-theoretic perspective and propose a framework for reward modeling, namely InfoRM, by introducing a variational information bottleneck objective to filter out irrelevant information.Notably, we further identify a correlation between overoptimization and outliers in the IB latent space of InfoRM, establishing it as a promising tool for detecting reward overoptimization.Inspired by this finding, we propose the Cluster Separation Index (CSI), which quantifies deviations in the IB latent space, as an indicator of reward overoptimization to facilitate the development of online mitigation strategies. Extensive experiments on a wide range of settings and RM scales (70M, 440M, 1.4B, and 7B) demonstrate the effectiveness of InfoRM. Further analyses reveal that InfoRM's overoptimization detection mechanism is not only effective but also robust across a broad range of datasets, signifying a notable advancement in the field of RLHF. The code will be released upon acceptance.