RLHF Workflow: From Reward Modeling to Online RLHF

Published: 21 Sept 2024, Last Modified: 21 Sept 2024Accepted by TMLREveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Abstract: We present the workflow of Online Iterative Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) in this technical report, which is widely reported to outperform its offline counterpart by a large margin in the recent large language model (LLM) literature. However, existing open-source RLHF projects are still largely confined to the offline learning setting. In this technical report, we aim to fill in this gap and provide a detailed recipe that is easy to reproduce for online iterative RLHF. In particular, since online human feedback is usually infeasible for open-source communities with limited resources, we start by constructing preference models using a diverse set of open-source datasets and use the constructed proxy preference model to approximate human feedback. Then, we discuss the theoretical insights and algorithmic principles behind online iterative RLHF, followed by a detailed practical implementation. Our trained LLM achieves impressive performance on LLM chatbot benchmarks, including AlpacaEval-2, Arena-Hard, and MT-Bench, as well as other academic benchmarks such as HumanEval and TruthfulQA. We have shown that supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and iterative RLHF can obtain state-of-the-art performance with fully open-source datasets. Further, we have made our models, curated datasets, and comprehensive step-by-step code guidebooks publicly available.
Submission Length: Long submission (more than 12 pages of main content)
Previous TMLR Submission Url: https://openreview.net/forum?id=dweuQ0jvv6
Changes Since Last Submission: Revise the format.
Code: https://github.com/RLHFlow/Online-RLHF ; https://github.com/RLHFlow/RLHF-Reward-Modeling
Supplementary Material: zip
Assigned Action Editor: ~Lihong_Li1
Submission Number: 2819
Loading