Enhancing Safety in Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback via Rectified Policy Optimization

Xiyue Peng, Hengquan Guo, jiawei zhang, Dongqing Zou, Ziyu Shao, Honghao Wei, Xin Liu

Keywords: Safe Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback, Large Language Model, Safety Alignment

TL;DR: We propose Rectified Policy Optimization (RePO) to mitigate "safety compensation", which replaces the average safety metric with stricter safety constraints.

Abstract: Balancing helpfulness and safety (harmlessness) is a critical challenge in aligning large language models (LLMs). Current approaches often decouple these two objectives, training separate preference models for helpfulness and safety, while framing safety as a constraint within a constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) framework. This paper identifies a potential issue when using the widely adopted expected safety constraints for LLM safety alignment, termed "safety compensation'', where the constraints are satisfied on expectation, but individual prompts may trade off safety, resulting in some responses being overly restrictive while others remain unsafe. To address this issue, we propose **Rectified Policy Optimization (RePO)**, which replaces the expected safety constraint with critical safety constraints imposed on every prompt. At the core of RePO is a policy update mechanism driven by rectified policy gradients, which penalizes the strict safety violation of every prompt, thereby enhancing safety across nearly all prompts. Our experiments demonstrate that RePO outperforms strong baseline methods and significantly enhances LLM safety alignment.

Primary Area: Reinforcement learning (e.g., decision and control, planning, hierarchical RL, robotics)

Submission Number: 10185