Learning to summarize from human feedback

Nisan Stiennon∗ Long Ouyang∗ Jeff Wu∗ Daniel M. Ziegler∗ Ryan Lowe∗

Chelsea Voss∗ Alec Radford Dario Amodei Paul Christiano∗

OpenAI

Abstract

As language models become more powerful, training and evaluation are increas-
ingly bottlenecked by the data and metrics used for a particular task. For example,
summarization models are often trained to predict human reference summaries and
evaluated using ROUGE, but both of these metrics are rough proxies for what we
really care about—summary quality. In this work, we show that it is possible to
significantly improve summary quality by training a model to optimize for human
preferences. We collect a large, high-quality dataset of human comparisons be-
tween summaries, train a model to predict the human-preferred summary, and use
that model as a reward function to fine-tune a summarization policy using reinforce-
ment learning. We apply our method to a version of the TL;DR dataset of Reddit
posts [63] and find that our models significantly outperform both human reference
summaries and much larger models fine-tuned with supervised learning alone. Our
models also transfer to CNN/DM news articles [22], producing summaries nearly
as good as the human reference without any news-specific fine-tuning.2 We con-
duct extensive analyses to understand our human feedback dataset and fine-tuned
models.3 We establish that our reward model generalizes to new datasets, and that
optimizing our reward model results in better summaries than optimizing ROUGE
according to humans. We hope the evidence from our paper motivates machine
learning researchers to pay closer attention to how their training loss affects the
model behavior they actually want.

1 Introduction
Large-scale language model pretraining has become increasingly prevalent for achieving high per-
formance on a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. When applying these models
to a specific task, they are usually fine-tuned using supervised learning, often to maximize the log
probability of a set of human demonstrations.
While this strategy has led to markedly improved performance, there is still a misalignment between
this fine-tuning objective—maximizing the likelihood of human-written text—and what we care
about—generating high-quality outputs as determined by humans. This misalignment has several
causes: the maximum likelihood objective has no distinction between important errors (e.g. making
up facts [41]) and unimportant errors (e.g. selecting the precise word from a set of synonyms); models
∗
This was a joint project of the OpenAI Reflection team. Author order was randomized amongst {LO, JW,
DZ, NS}; CV and RL were full-time contributors for most of the duration. PC is the team lead.
2
Samples from all of our models can be viewed on our website.
3
We provide inference code for our 1.3B models and baselines, as well as a model card and our human
feedback dataset with over 64k summary comparisons, here.

34th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2020), Vancouver, Canada.
 Human feedback

Reference summaries

Supervised learning

Pretrain only

Figure 1: Fraction of the time humans prefer our models’ summaries over the human-generated
reference summaries on the TL;DR dataset.4 Since quality judgments involve an arbitrary decision
about how to trade off summary length vs. coverage within the 24-48 token limit, we also provide
length-controlled graphs in Appendix F; length differences explain about a third of the gap between
feedback and supervised learning at 6.7B.

are incentivized to place probability mass on all human demonstrations, including those that are
low-quality; and distributional shift during sampling can degrade performance [56, 52]. Quality can
often be improved significantly by non-uniform sampling strategies such as beam search [51], but
these can lead to repetition and other undesirable artifacts [69, 23]. Optimizing for quality may be a
principled approach to overcoming these problems.
Our goal in this paper is to advance methods for training language models on objectives that more
closely capture the behavior we care about. To make short-term progress towards this goal, we
focus on abstractive English text summarization, as it has a long history in the NLP community
[16, 8, 54, 59, 50], and is a subjective task where we believe it is difficult to quantify summary quality
without human judgments. Indeed, existing automatic metrics for evaluating summary quality, such
as ROUGE [39], have received criticism for poor correlation with human judgments [55, 45, 6, 33].
We follow the works of [3, 73], who fine-tune language models from human feedback using reward
learning [35]. We first collect a dataset of human preferences between pairs of summaries, then train
a reward model (RM) via supervised learning to predict the human-preferred summary. Finally, we
train a policy via reinforcement learning (RL) to maximize the score given by the RM; the policy
generates a token of text at each ‘time step’, and is updated using the PPO algorithm [58] based on
the RM ‘reward’ given to the entire generated summary. We can then gather more human data using
samples from the resulting policy, and repeat the process. We follow the works of [48, 4] and use
large pretrained GPT-3 models with as many as 6.7 billion parameters.
Our main contributions are four-fold.
(1) We show that training with human feedback significantly outperforms very strong baselines
on English summarization. When applying our methods on a version of the Reddit TL;DR dataset
[63], we train policies via human feedback that produce better summaries than much larger policies
trained via supervised learning. Summaries from our human feedback models are preferred by our
labelers to the original human demonstrations in the dataset (see Figure 1).
(2) We show human feedback models generalize much better to new domains than supervised
models. Our Reddit-trained human feedback models also generate high-quality summaries of news
articles on the CNN/DailyMail (CNN/DM) dataset without any news-specific fine-tuning, almost
matching the quality of the dataset’s reference summaries. We perform several checks to ensure
that these human preferences reflect a real quality difference: we consistently monitor agreement
rates amongst labelers and researchers, and find researcher-labeler agreement rates are nearly as high
as researcher-researcher agreement rates (see Section C.2), and we verify models are not merely
optimizing simple metrics like length or amount of copying (see Appendices F and G.7).
4
Throughout the paper, error bars represent 1 standard error.

2
(3) We conduct extensive empirical analyses of our policy and reward model. We examine the
impact of model and data size (Figure 6), study performance as we continue to optimize a given
reward model (Section 4.3), and analyze reward model performance using synthetic and human-
written perturbations of summaries (Section 4.3). We confirm that our reward model outperforms
other metrics such as ROUGE at predicting human preferences, and that optimizing our reward model
directly results in better summaries than optimizing ROUGE according to humans (Section 4.4).
(4) We publicly release our human feedback dataset for further research. The dataset contains
64,832 summary comparisons on the TL;DR dataset, as well as our evaluation data on both TL;DR
(comparisons and Likert scores) and CNN/DM (Likert scores).
The methods we present in this paper are motivated in part by longer-term concerns about the
misalignment of AI systems with what humans want them to do. When misaligned summarization
models make up facts, their mistakes are fairly low-risk and easy to spot. However, as AI systems
become more powerful and are given increasingly important tasks, the mistakes they make will likely
become more subtle and safety-critical, making this an important area for further research.

2 Related work
Most directly related to our work is previous work using human feedback to train summarization
models with RL [3, 73]. Bohm et al. [3] learn a reward function from a dataset of human ratings of
2.5k CNN/DM summaries, and train a policy whose summaries are preferred to a policy optimizing
ROUGE. Our work is most similar to [73], who also train Transformer models [62] to optimize human
feedback across a range of tasks, including summarization on the Reddit TL;DR and CNN/DM
datasets. Unlike us, they train in an online manner and find the model highly extractive. They
note that their labelers prefer extractive summaries and have low agreement rates with researchers.
Compared to [73], we use significantly larger models, move to the batch setting for collecting human
feedback, ensure high labeler-researcher agreement, and make some algorithmic modifications, such
as separating the policy and value networks.
Human feedback has also been used as a reward to train models in other domains such as dialogue
[25, 68, 21], translation [32, 1], semantic parsing [34], story generation [72], review generation
[7], and evidence extraction [46]. Our reward modeling approach was developed in prior work
on learning to rank [40], which has been applied to ranking search results using either explicit
feedback [2, 18] or implicit feedback in the form of click-through data [29, 30]. In a related line of
research, human feedback has been used to train agents in simulated environments [10, 24]. There
is also a rich literature on using RL to optimize automatic metrics for NLP tasks, such as ROUGE
for summarization [50, 65, 45, 15, 19], BLEU for translation [50, 66, 1, 43], and other domains
[61, 27, 26]. Finally, there has been extensive research on modifying architectures [22, 59] and
pre-training procedures [70, 36, 49, 60, 53, 14] for improving summarization performance.

3 Method and experiment details

3.1 High-level methodology

Our approach is similar to the one outlined in [73], adapted to the batch setting. We start with an
initial policy that is fine-tuned via supervised learning on the desired dataset (in our case, the Reddit
TL;DR summarization dataset). The process (illustrated in Figure 2) then consists of three steps that
can be repeated iteratively.
Step 1: Collect samples from existing policies and send comparisons to humans. For each
Reddit post, we sample summaries from several sources including the current policy, initial policy,
original reference summaries and various baselines. We send a batch of pairs of summaries to our
human evaluators, who are tasked with selecting the best summary of a given Reddit post.
Step 2: Learn a reward model from human comparisons. Given a post and a candidate summary,
we train a reward model to predict the log odds that this summary is the better one, as judged by our
labelers.
Step 3: Optimize a policy against the reward model. We treat the logit output of the reward model
as a reward that we optimize using reinforcement learning, specifically with the PPO algorithm [58].

3
1 Collect human feedback 2 Train reward model 3 Train policy with PPO

A Reddit post is One post with A new post is

sampled from two summaries sampled from the
the Reddit judged by a dataset.
TL;DR dataset. human are fed
to the reward
model.
j k

The policy π
Various policies The reward generates a
are used to model summary for the
sample a set of calculates a post. π r
summaries. reward r for
each summary. r r

Two summaries
are selected for
evaluation. rj rk
j k

The loss is The reward

calculated based model calculates
A human judges a reward for the
on the rewards
which is a better summary.
and human label, loss = log(σ(rj - rk ))
summary of the
and is used to
r
post.
update the
reward model. The reward is
used to update
the policy via
“j is better than k” “j is better than k” PPO. r

Figure 2: Diagram of our human feedback, reward model training, and policy training procedure.

We provide a more thorough description of our procedure, including details of the reward model and
policy training and our quality control process, in the following sections. In practice, rather than
precisely iterating this sequence of three steps, we updated our data collection and training procedures
over the course of the project while accumulating labels (see Appendix C.6 for details).

3.2 Datasets and task

Datasets. We use the TL;DR summarization dataset [63], which contains ~3 million posts from
reddit.com across a variety of topics (subreddits), as well summaries of the posts written by the
original poster (TL;DRs). We additionally filter this dataset (see Appendix A) to ensure quality,
including using a whitelist of subreddits that are understandable to the general population. Crucially,
we also filter to include only posts where the human-written summaries contain between 24 and
48 tokens, to minimize the potential effect of summary length on quality (see Section 4.1 and
Appendix F). Our final filtered dataset contains 123,169 posts, and we hold out ~5% as a validation
set. For the remainder of this paper, we refer to this dataset simply as TL;DR.
We chose the TL;DR dataset over the more commonly used CNN/DM dataset primarily because
very strong performance can be attained on CNN/DM with simple extractive baselines. We find in
Section 4.2 that our labelers prefer lead-3 over the CNN/DM reference summaries,5 and that the
supervised T5 model [49] with low-temperature sampling already surpasses the reference summary
quality, while copying extensively from the article. On the other hand, simple extractive baselines
perform poorly on TL;DR in our human evaluations (see Appendix G.2). Instead of training on
CNN/DM, we study the transfer performance of our human feedback models to CNN/DM after being
trained to summarize Reddit posts.

Task. We define our ground-truth task as producing a model that generates summaries fewer than
48 tokens long that are as good as possible, according to our judgments. We judge summary quality
by how faithfully the summary conveys the original post to a reader who can only read the summary
and not the post (see Appendix C.5 for further discussion of criteria). Since we have limited capacity
to do comparisons, we hire labelers to do the comparisons for us. We rely on detailed procedures to
ensure high agreement between labelers and us on the task, which we describe in the next section.

5
We manually check this result in Appendix E and find we generally agree with labeler ratings.

4
 [r/dating_advice] First date ever, going to the beach. Would like some tips
Hey Reddit! I (20M) would like some tips, because I have my first ever date tomorrow (although I’ve had a gf for 3
years, but no actual dating happened), and we’re going to the beach.

I met this girl, we have mutual friends, at a festival a few days ago. We didn’t kiss, but we talked, held
hands, danced a bit. I asked her to go on a date with me, which was super hard as it is the first time I’ve asked this
to anybody. What I mean to say is, it’s not like a standard *first* date because we already spent some time together.

I’m really nervous and excited. I’m going to pick her up tomorrow, we’re cycling to the beach which will
take 30 minutes, and then what? I’m a bit scared. Should I bring something (the weather, although no rain and
sunny, is not super so no swimming), should we do something. I’d like all the tips I can get. Thanks!
Human written reference TL;DR 6.7B supervised model 6.7B human feedback model
First date after 3 years in a relation- Going on a date with a girl I met Going on my first ever date tomor-
ship, going to the beach, terrified. a few days ago, going to the beach. row, cycling to the beach. Would
What to bring with me, what to do? What should I bring, what should like some tips on what to do and
we do? bring. I’m a bit nervous and excited.
Thanks!
Table 1: Example of post and samples on the TL;DR dataset, chosen to be particularly short. For
random samples (along with posts), see Appendix H and our website.

3.3 Collecting human feedback

Previous work on fine-tuning language models from human feedback [73] reported “a mismatch
between the notion of quality we wanted our model to learn, and what the humans labelers actually
evaluated”, leading to model-generated summaries that were high-quality according to the labelers,
but fairly low-quality according to the researchers.
Compared to [73], we implement two changes to improve human data quality. First, we transition
entirely to the offline setting, where we alternate between sending large batches of comparison data6
to our human labelers and re-training our models on the cumulative collected data. Second, we
maintain a hands-on relationship with labelers:7 we on-board them with detailed instructions, answer
their questions in a shared chat room, and provide regular feedback on their performance. We train all
labelers to ensure high agreement with our judgments, and continuously monitor labeler-researcher
agreement over the course of the project. See Appendix C.1 and C.5 for details.
As a result of our procedure, we obtained high labeler-researcher agreement: on a subset of compari-
son tasks, labelers agree with researchers 77% ± 2% of the time, while researchers agree with each
other 73% ± 4% of the time. We provide more analysis of our human data quality in Appendix C.2.

3.4 Models

All of our models are Transformer decoders [62] in the style of GPT-3 [47, 4]. We conduct our human
feedback experiments on models with 1.3 billion (1.3B) and 6.7 billion (6.7B) parameters.

Pretrained models. Similarly to [12, 47], we start with models pretrained to autoregressively
predict the next token in a large text corpus. As in [48, 4], we use these models as ‘zero-shot’
baselines by padding the context with examples of high-quality summaries from the dataset. We
provide details on pretraining in Appendix B, and on our zero-shot procedure in Appendix B.2.

Supervised baselines. We next fine-tune these models via supervised learning to predict summaries
from our filtered TL;DR dataset (see Appendix B for details). We use these supervised models to
sample initial summaries for collecting comparisons, to initialize our policy and reward models, and
as baselines for evaluation. In our final human evaluations, we use T=0 to sample from all models, as
we found it performed better than higher temperatures or nucleus sampling (see Appendix B.1).
To validate that our supervised models are indeed strong baselines for comparison, we run our
supervised fine-tuning procedure with our 6.7B model on the CNN/DM dataset, and find that we
achieve slightly better ROUGE scores than SOTA models [71] from mid-2019 (see Appendix G.4).

6
Our decision to collect comparisons rather than Likert scores is supported by recent work, e.g. [37].
7
We recruited labelers from a freelancing platform, Upwork, and two labeling services, Scale and Lionbridge.

5
Reward models. To train our reward models, we start from a supervised baseline, as described
above, then add a randomly initialized linear head that outputs a scalar value. We train this model to
predict which summary y ∈ {y0 , y1 } is better as judged by a human, given a post x. If the summary
preferred by the human is yi , we can write the RM loss as:
loss(rθ ) = E(x,y0 ,y1 ,i)∼D [log(σ(rθ (x, yi ) − rθ (x, y1−i )))]
where rθ (x, y) is the scalar output of the reward model for post x and summary y with parameters θ,
and D is the dataset of human judgments. At the end of training, we normalize the reward model
outputs such that the reference summaries from our dataset achieve a mean score of 0.

Human feedback policies. We want to use the reward model trained above to train a policy that
generates higher-quality outputs as judged by humans. We primarily do this using reinforcement
learning, by treating the output of the reward model as a reward for the entire summary that we
maximize with the PPO algorithm [58], where each time step is a BPE token.8 We initialize our
policy to be the model fine-tuned on Reddit TL;DR. Importantly, we include a term in the reward that
penalizes the KL divergence between the learned RL policy πφRL with parameters φ and this original
supervised model π SFT , as previously done in [25]. The full reward R can be written as:
R(x, y) = rθ (x, y) − β log[πφRL (y|x)/π SFT (y|x)]
This KL term serves two purposes. First, it acts as an entropy bonus, encouraging the policy to
explore and deterring it from collapsing to a single mode. Second, it ensures the policy doesn’t learn
to produce outputs that are too different from those that the reward model has seen during training.
For the PPO value function, we use a Transformer with completely separate parameters from the
policy. This prevents updates to the value function from partially destroying the pretrained policy
early in training (see ablation in Appendix G.1). We initialize the value function to the parameters of
the reward model. In our experiments, the reward model, policy, and value function are the same size.

4 Results
4.1 Summarizing Reddit posts from human feedback

Policies trained with human feedback are preferred to much larger supervised policies. Our
main results evaluating our human feedback policies on TL;DR are shown in Figure 1. We measure
policy quality as the percentage of summaries generated by that policy that humans prefer over
the reference summaries in the dataset. Our policies trained with human feedback significantly
outperform our supervised baselines on this metric, with our 1.3B human feedback model significantly
outperforming a supervised model 10× its size (61% versus 43% raw preference score against
reference summaries). Our 6.7B model in turn significantly outperforms our 1.3B model, suggesting
that training with human feedback also benefits from scale. Additionally, both of our human feedback
models are judged by humans to be superior to the human demonstrations used in the dataset.

Controlling for summary length. When judging summary quality, summary length is a confound-
ing factor. The target length of a summary is implicitly part of the summarization task; depending on
the desired trade-off between conciseness and coverage, a shorter or longer summary might be better.
Since our models learned to generate longer summaries, length could account for much of our quality
improvements. We find that after controlling for length (Appendix F), the preference of our human
feedback models vs. reference summaries drops by ~5%; even so, our 6.7B model summaries are still
preferred to the reference summaries ~65% of the time.

How do our policies improve over the baselines? To better understand the quality of our models’
summaries compared to the reference summaries and those of our supervised baselines, we conduct
an additional analysis where human labelers assess summary quality across four dimensions (or
“axes”) using a 7-point Likert scale [38]. Labelers rated summaries for coverage (how much important
information from the original post is covered), accuracy (to what degree the statements in the summary
are stated in the post), coherence (how easy the summary is to read on its own), and overall quality.
8
Note that the reward model only gives rewards for entire summaries, and not at intermediate time steps. In
RL terminology, each episode terminates when the policy outputs the EOS token, and the discount factor γ = 1.

6
 Lead-3

T5 CNN/DM
finetuning
Reference summaries Supervised
CNN/DM
Human feedback
transfer

Pretrain
only
Supervised
transfer

(a) (b)
Figure 4: Transfer results on CNN/DM. (a) Overall summary quality on CNN/DM as a function of
model size. Full results across axes shown in Appendix G.2. (b) Overall scores vs. length for the
6.7B TL;DR supervised baseline, the 6.7B TL;DR human feedback model, and T5 fine-tuned on
CNN/DM summaries. At similar summary lengths, our 6.7B TL;DR human feedback model nearly
matches T5 despite never being trained to summarize news articles.
The results (Figure 3) indicate that our human feedback
models outperform the supervised baselines across every
dimension of quality, but particularly coverage. Although
our human labelers had a high bar for giving perfect overall
scores, summaries from our 6.7B PPO model achieve a 7/7
overall score 45% of the time (compared to 20% and 23%
for the 6.7B supervised baseline and reference summaries,
respectively).

4.2 Transfer to summarizing news articles

Our human feedback models can also generate excellent

summaries of CNN/DM news articles without any further Figure 3: Evaluations of four axes of
training (Figure 4). Our human feedback models signifi- summary quality on the TL;DR dataset.
cantly outperform models trained via supervised learning
on TL;DR and models trained only on pretraining corpora. In fact, our 6.7B human feedback model
performs almost as well as a 6.7B model that was fine-tuned on the CNN/DM reference summaries,
despite generating much shorter summaries.
Since our human feedback models transferred to CNN/DM have little overlap in summary length
distribution with models trained on CNN/DM, with about half as many tokens on average, they are
difficult to compare directly. Thus our evaluations in Figure 4 use a 7-point Likert scale on four
quality dimensions, as in Section 4.1 (see Appendix C.5 for labeler instructions). In Figure 4b we
show the average overall score at different summary lengths, which suggests our human feedback
models would perform even better if they generated longer summaries. Qualitatively, CNN/DM
summaries from our human feedback models are consistently fluent and reasonable representations
of the article; we show examples on our website and in Appendix H.

4.3 Understanding the reward model

What happens as we optimize the reward model? Optimizing against our reward model is
supposed to make our policy align with human preferences. But the reward model isn’t a perfect
representation of our labeler preferences, as it has limited capacity and only sees a small amount of
comparison data from a relatively narrow distribution of summaries. While we can hope our reward
model generalizes to summaries unseen during training, it’s unclear how much one can optimize
against the reward model until it starts giving useless evaluations.
To answer this question, we created a range of policies optimized against an earlier version of our
reward model, with varying degrees of optimization strength, and asked labelers to compare samples
from them to the reference summaries. Figure 5 shows the results for PPO at a range of KL penalty

7
 Ensemble of humans

RM prediction
Human baseline
64k
32k
16k
8k

Actual preference

Figure 5: Preference scores versus degree of Figure 6: Reward model performance versus
reward model optimization. Optimizing against data size and model size. Doubling amount of
the reward model initially improves summaries, training data leads to a ~1.1% increase in reward
but eventually overfits, giving worse summaries. model validation accuracy, whereas doubling
This figure uses an earlier version of our reward the model size leads to a ~1.8% increase. The
model (see rm3 in Appendix C.6). See Appendix 6.7B model trained on all data begins approach-
H.2 for samples from the KL 250 model. ing the accuracy of a single human.

coefficients (β). Under light optimization, the models improve (according to labelers). However, as
we optimize further, true preferences fall off compared to the prediction, and eventually the reward
model becomes anti-correlated with human preferences. Though this is clearly undesirable, we note
that this over-optimization also happens with ROUGE (see [45] and Appendix G.3). Similar behavior
has been observed in learned reward functions in the robotics domain [5].

How does reward modeling scale with increasing model and data size? We conduct an ablation
to determine how data quantity and model size affect reward modeling performance. We train 7
reward models ranging from 160M to 13B parameters, on 8k to 64k human comparisons from our
dataset. We find that doubling the training data amount leads to a ~1.1% increase in the reward model
validation set accuracy, whereas doubling the model size leads to a ~1.8% increase (Figure 6).

What has the reward model learned? We probe our reward model by evaluating it on several
validation sets. We show the full results in Appendix G.6, and highlight them here. We find that our
reward models generalize to evaluating CNN/DM summaries (Appendix G.7), agreeing with labeler
preferences 62.4% and 66.5% of the time (for our 1.3B and 6.7B models, respectively). Our 6.7B
reward model nearly matches the inter-labeler agreement value of 66.9%.
We also find that our reward models are sensitive to small but semantically important details in
the summary. We construct an additional validation set by having labelers make minimal edits to
summaries to improve them. Our RMs prefer the edited summaries almost as often (79.4% for 1.3B
and 82.8% for 6.7B) as a separate set of human evaluators (84.1%). Further, when comparing the
reference summaries to perturbed summaries where the participants’ roles are reversed, our models
reliably select the original summary (92.9% of the time for 1.3B, 97.2% for 6.7B). However, our RMs
are biased towards longer summaries: our 6.7B RM prefers improving edits that make the summary
shorter only 62.6% of the time (vs. 76.4% for humans).

4.4 Analyzing automatic metrics for summarization

Evaluation. We study how well various automatic metrics act as predictors for human preferences,
and compare them to our RMs. Specifically, we examine ROUGE, summary length, amount of
copying from the post,9 and log probability under our baseline supervised models. We present a full
matrix of agreement rates between these metrics in Appendix G.7.
We find that our learned reward models consistently outperform other metrics, even on the CNN/DM
dataset on which it was never trained. We also find that ROUGE fails to track sample quality as our
9
We measure copying by computing the longest common subsequence of bigrams with the original Reddit
post or news article, and dividing by the number of bigrams in the summary.

8
Figure 7: Summary quality as a function of metric optimized and amount of optimization, using
best-of-N rejection sampling. We evaluate ROUGE, our main reward models, and an earlier iteration
of the 1.3B model trained on approximately 75% as much data (see Table 11 for details). ROUGE
appears to peak both sooner and at a substantially lower preference rate than all reward models.
Details in Appendix G.3.
models improve. While ROUGE has ~57% agreement with labelers when comparing samples from
our supervised baseline models, this drops to ~50% for samples from our human feedback model.
Similarly, log probability agreement with humans drops to ≤50% on comparisons between samples
from our human feedback models, while our RMs still perform above chance (62%). Scaling up the
size of the supervised model does not reliably improve log probability’s agreement with labelers.

Optimization. In Figure 7, we show that optimizing ROUGE using a simple optimization scheme
doesn’t consistently increase quality, as has been noted in [45]. Optimization against ROUGE peaks
both sooner and at a substantially lower quality rate than optimization against our reward models.

5 Discussion
Limitations. One limitation of our work is the time and cost required to produce our final models.
Notably, fine-tuning our 6.7B model with RL required approximately 320 GPU-days. Our data
collection procedure is also expensive compared to prior work — the training set took thousands of
labeler hours and required significant researcher time to ensure quality. For this reason, we were
unable to collect baselines such as an equivalent amount of high-quality human demonstrations for
supervised baselines. See D for more discussion. We leave this ablation to future work. Nevertheless,
we believe reward modeling is more likely to scale to tasks where it is extremely skill-intensive or
time-consuming to provide good demonstrations.

Future directions. The methods in this paper could be applied to any task where humans can
compare samples, including dialogue, machine translation, question answering, speech synthesis, and
music generation. We expect this method to be particularly important for generating long samples,
where the distributional shift and degeneracy of maximum likelihood samples can be problematic. It
may be possible to improve sample efficiency by training to predict feedback across many tasks [42].
We are particularly interested in scaling human feedback to tasks where humans can’t easily evaluate
the quality of model outputs. In this setting, it is particularly challenging to identify whether an ML
system is aligned with the human designer’s intentions. One approach is to train ML systems to help
humans perform the evaluation task quickly and accurately [9].
There is also a rich landscape of human feedback methods beyond binary comparisons that could be
explored for training models [28, 17, 44, 64]. For example, we could solicit high-quality demonstra-
tions from labelers, have labelers edit model outputs to make them better, or have labelers provide
explanations for why they preferred one model output over another. All of this feedback could be
leveraged as a signal to train more capable reward models and policies.

9
Broader impacts. The techniques we explore in this paper are generic techniques that could be
used in a wide variety of machine learning applications, for any task where it is feasible for humans
to evaluate the quality of model outputs. Thus, the potential implications are quite broad.
Our research is primarily motivated by the potential positive effects of aligning machine learning
algorithms with the designer’s preferences. Many machine learning applications optimize simple
metrics which are only rough proxies for what the designer intends. This can lead to problems, such
as Youtube recommendations promoting click-bait [11]. In the short term, improving techniques for
learning from and optimizing human preferences directly may enable these applications to be more
aligned with human well-being.
In the long term, as machine learning systems become more capable it will likely become increasingly
difficult to ensure that they are behaving safely: the mistakes they make might be more difficult to
spot, and the consequences will be more severe. For instance, writing an inaccurate summary of a
news article is both easy to notice (one simply has to read the original article) and has fairly low
consequences. On the other hand, imitating human driving may be substantially less safe than driving
to optimize human preferences. We believe that the techniques we explore in this paper are promising
steps towards mitigating the risks from such capable systems, and better aligning them with what
humans care about.
Unfortunately, our techniques also enable malicious actors to more easily train models that cause
societal harm. For instance, one could use human feedback to fine-tune a language model to be more
persuasive and manipulate humans’ beliefs, or to induce dependence of humans on the technology, or
to generate large amounts of toxic or hurtful content intended to harm specific individuals. Avoiding
these outcomes is a significant challenge for which there are few obvious solutions.
Large-scale models trained with human feedback could have significant impacts on many groups.
Thus, it is important to be careful about how we define the ‘good’ model behavior that human labelers
will reinforce. Deciding what makes a good summary is fairly straightforward, but doing this for
tasks with more complex objectives, where different humans might disagree on the correct model
behavior, will require significant care. In these cases, it is likely not appropriate to use researcher
labels as the ‘gold standard’; rather, individuals from groups impacted by the technology should be
included in the process to define ‘good’ behavior, and hired as labelers to reinforce this behavior in
the model.
We chose to train on the Reddit TL;DR dataset because the summarization task is significantly more
challenging than on CNN/DM. However, since the dataset consists of user-submitted posts with
minimal moderation, they often contain content that is offensive or reflects harmful social biases.
This means our models can generate biased or offensive summaries, as they have been trained to
summarize such content. For this reason, we recommend that the potential harms of our models be
thoroughly studied before deploying them in user-facing applications.
Finally, by improving the ability of machine learning algorithms to perform tasks that were previously
only achievable by humans, we are increasing the likelihood of many jobs being automated, potentially
leading to significant job loss. Without suitable policies targeted at mitigating the effects of large-scale
unemployment, this could also lead to significant societal harm.

Acknowledgements

We’d like to thank Beth Barnes for help with labeler hiring and general encouragement; Geoffrey
Irving for guidance on earlier iterations of the project and inspiring conversations; Ben Mann, Tom
Brown, Nick Ryder, and Melanie Subbiah for training and evaluating our pretrained models; Chris
Hesse, Eric Sigler, Benjamin Chess, Christopher Berner, Clemens Winter, Mateusz Litwin, and many
others for supporting us through computing infrastructure improvements and maintenance; Scott
Gray for writing fast GPU kernels; Arvind Neelakantan and Wojciech Kryscinski for discussions on
how to present the work, experiment design, and what datasets to use; Shan Carter for help designing
the main diagram; Douwe Kiela, Zach Lipton, and Alex Irpan for providing feedback on the paper;
and Gretchen Krueger for co-writing the model card accompanying the paper.
Finally, we’d like to thank all of our contractors for providing the data that was essential for training
the models in this paper, including: Emill Jayson Caypuno, Rachelle Froyalde, Cyra Denura, Alex
Malek, Isik Agil, Reshmi Patel, William Yap, Natalie Silver, Erol Akbaba, Jennifer Brillo, Alexandra

10
Uifalean, Morris Stuttard, Russell Bernandez, Tasmai Dave, Rachel Wallace, Jenny Fletcher, Jian
Ouyang, Justin Dill, Maria Orzek, Megan Niffenegger, William Sells, Emily Mariner, Andrew Seely,
Lychelle Ignacio, Jelena Ostojic, Nhan Tran, Purev Batdelgar, Valentina Kezic, Michelle Wilkerson,
Kelly Guerrero, Heather Scott, Sarah Mulligan, Gabriel Ricafrente, Kara Bell, Gabriel Perez, and
Alfred Lee.

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