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Reward Hacking in RLHF

HardMachine Learning00:00
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Your question is Reward Hacking in RLHF. Take a moment with it on the right.

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Problem

How do you handle reward hacking during Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF)?

Explain how you would detect when a policy exploits weaknesses in a reward model rather than improving the intended behavior. Discuss reward-model validation, held-out evaluations, adversarial testing, independent human judgments, and training controls such as KL regularization or conservative policy updates.

Provide a practical mitigation plan, pseudocode or Python for one detection or evaluation component, and concrete metrics you would monitor. Address trade-offs between reward optimization, capability, alignment, evaluation cost, and distribution shift.