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Iterative Data Smoothing: Mitigating Reward Overfitting and Overoptimization in RLHF episode artwork

Oct 9, 2025 17 min

Iterative Data Smoothing: Mitigating Reward Overfitting and Overoptimization in RLHF

from Best AI papers explained Hosted by Enoch H. Kang

This paper investigate two major drawbacks in the reward learning phase of RLHF: reward overfitting and reward overoptimization, which often occur because the standard cross-entropy loss is inadequate for imbalanced preference datasets. To address these issues, the paper introduces a novel algorithm called Iterative Data Smoothing (IDS), which mitigates these problems by iteratively updating hard comparison labels with softer, model-predicted labels during training. Theoretical analysis and empirical results in both multi-armed bandit and neural network settings demonstrate that IDS outperforms traditional Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE), offering a more robust approach to reward training.

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Iterative Data Smoothing: Mitigating Reward Overfitting and Overoptimization in RLHF

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