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Concept· 3 min

What is RLHF?

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback aligns a model to human preferences after pre-training.

Key idea

Humans rank pairs of model outputs; a reward model learns those preferences; the LLM is then fine-tuned to maximize that reward.

Example

ChatGPT used RLHF to become helpful, harmless and honest instead of just a raw next-token predictor.

What to remember

  • Turns a raw LM into a well-behaved assistant
  • Modern variants: DPO, GRPO, RLAIF
  • Sensitive to labeler quality and bias