Reward Model Overoptimisation in Iterated RLHF

Abstract

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a widely used method for aligning large language models with human preferences. However, RLHF often suffers from reward model overoptimisation, in which models overfit to the reward function, resulting in non-generalisable policies that exploit the idiosyncrasies and peculiarities of the reward function. A common mitigation is iterated RLHF, in which reward models are repeatedly retrained with updated human feedback and policies are re-optimised. Despite its increasing adoption, the dynamics of overoptimisation in this setting remain poorly understood. In this work, we present the first comprehensive study of overoptimisation in iterated RLHF. We systematically analyse key design choices - how reward model training data is transferred across iterations, which reward function is used for optimisation, and how policies are initialised. Using the controlled AlpacaFarm benchmark, we observe that overoptimisation tends to decrease over successive iterations, as reward models increasingly approximate ground-truth preferences. However, performance gains diminish over time, and while reinitialising from the base policy is robust, it limits optimisation flexibility. Other initialisation strategies often fail to recover from early overoptimisation. These findings offer actionable insights for building more stable and generalisable RLHF pipelines.