Wasserstein Distributionally Robust Regret Optimization for Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback
Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a central post-training tool for aligning large language models, but its training reward is only a learned proxy for true human utility. This creates a decision problem under objective misspecification: the policy is optimized against an estimated reward, while deployment performance is governed by an unobserved population preference. The resulting gap leads to reward over-optimization, where proxy reward keeps improving after true quality deteriorates. We propose distributionally robust regret optimization (DRRO) for RLHF with a Wasserstein ambiguity set over reward laws, using promptwise $\ell_p$ distances between reward vectors as tr...
| Authors | Yikai Wang, Shang Liu, Jose Blanchet |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 30 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 9 August 2026 |
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