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Dictionary

RLHF

Reinforcement learning from human feedback, the alignment technique behind ChatGPT.

1 min readupdated 2026-07-04

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RLHF trains a reward model from human preference pairs, then fine-tunes the base LLM with PPO to maximize that reward. Result: models that follow instructions and refuse unsafe requests. Reinforcement learning from human feedback, the alignment technique behind ChatGPT.

Reinforcement learning from human feedback, the alignment technique behind ChatGPT. RLHF trains a reward model from human preference pairs, then fine-tunes the base LLM with PPO to maximize that reward. Result: models that follow instructions and refuse unsafe requests. In practice: ChatGPT's instruction-following polish comes from RLHF applied on top of GPT-3.5.
Definition
RLHF trains a reward model from human preference pairs, then fine-tunes the base LLM with PPO to maximize that reward. Result: models that follow instructions and refuse unsafe requests.
Example
ChatGPT's instruction-following polish comes from RLHF applied on top of GPT-3.5.

/ frequently asked

What is RLHF?

RLHF trains a reward model from human preference pairs, then fine-tunes the base LLM with PPO to maximize that reward. Result: models that follow instructions and refuse unsafe requests.

What is an example of RLHF?

ChatGPT's instruction-following polish comes from RLHF applied on top of GPT-3.5.

Why does RLHF matter?

Reinforcement learning from human feedback, the alignment technique behind ChatGPT.

What should I learn after RLHF?

Open the related workflows and prompts further down this page: they show how this idea is applied in a real task, step by step.

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