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Leveraging Domain Knowledge for Efficient Reward Modelling in RLHF: A Case-Study in E-Commerce Opinion Summarization

23 Feb 2024arXiv:2402.15473archive 2025-07-28

Swaroop Nath, Tejpalsingh Siledar, Sankara Sri Raghava Ravindra Muddu, Rupasai Rangaraju, Harshad Khadilkar, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Suman Banerjee, Amey Patil, Sudhanshu Shekhar Singh, Muthusamy Chelliah, Nikesh Garera

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has become a dominating strategy in aligning Language Models (LMs) with human values/goals. The key to the strategy is learning a reward model (φ), which can reflect the latent reward model of humans. While this strategy has proven effective, the training methodology requires a lot of human preference annotation (usually in the order of tens of thousands) to train φ. Such a large-scale annotation is justifiable when it's a one-time effort, and the reward model is universally applicable. However, human goals are subjective and depend on the task, requiring task-specific preference annotations, which can be impractical to fulfill. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach to infuse domain knowledge into φ, which reduces the amount of preference annotation required (21×), omits Alignment Tax, and provides some interpretability. We validate our approach in E-Commerce Opinion Summarization, with a significant reduction in dataset size (to just $940$ samples) while advancing the SOTA (∼4 point ROUGE-L improvement, 68% of times preferred by humans over SOTA). Our contributions include a novel Reward Modeling technique and two new datasets: PromptOpinSumm (supervised data for Opinion Summarization) and OpinPref (a gold-standard human preference dataset). The proposed methodology opens up avenues for efficient RLHF, making it more adaptable to applications with varying human values. We release the artifacts (Code: github.com/efficient-rlhf. PromptOpinSumm: hf.co/prompt-opin-summ. OpinPref: hf.co/opin-pref) for usage under MIT License.

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