Reviving The Classics: Active Reward Modeling in Large Language Model Alignment

Abstract: Building neural reward models from human preferences is a pivotal component in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and LLM alignment research. Given the scarcity and high cost of human annotation, how to select the most informative pairs to annotate is an essential yet challenging open problem. In this work, we highlight the insight that an ideal comparison dataset for reward modeling should balance exploration of the representation space and make informative comparisons between pairs with moderate reward differences. Technically, challenges arise in quantifying the two objectives and efficiently prioritizing the comparisons to be annotated. To address this, we propose the Fisher information-based selection strategies, adapt theories from the classical experimental design literature, and apply them to the final linear layer of the deep neural network-based reward modeling tasks. Empirically, our method demonstrates remarkable performance, high computational efficiency, and stability compared to other selection methods from deep learning and classical statistical literature across multiple open-source LLMs and datasets. Further ablation studies reveal that incorporating cross-prompt comparisons in active reward modeling significantly enhances labeling efficiency, shedding light on the potential for improved annotation strategies in RLHF.