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Preference Learning & RLHF Tasks

This category contains annotation task designs for reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), preference learning, and AI alignment research.

Run these designs in Potato. See the annotation types and quality control docs to build reliable preference-annotation tasks.

Tasks

Design Description Reference
alpacafarm-simulation Simulate human preferences for instruction-following responses Dubois et al., NeurIPS 2023
beavertails-safety-preference Annotate AI responses for safety across multiple harm categories Ji et al., NeurIPS 2023
constitutional-ai-harmlessness Evaluate AI assistant responses for harmlessness and helpfulness based on the Constitutional AI framework… Bai et al., arXiv 2022
dpo-preference-data Pairwise preference annotation for Direct Preference Optimization, based on Rafailov et al., NeurIPS 2023 Rafailov et al., NeurIPS 2023
helpsteer-multiattribute-rating Multi-dimensional response quality rating for reward model training Wang et al., NAACL 2024
hh-rlhf-pairwise-preference Classic pairwise preference annotation for helpfulness and harmlessness Bai et al., 2022
instructgpt-preference Evaluate how well AI responses follow user instructions Ouyang et al., NeurIPS 2022
mmlu-pro-tiered-eval Tiered evaluation for multi-subject question answering, based on MMLU-Pro Wang et al., NeurIPS 2024 (Datasets & Benchmarks)
oasst-conversation-quality Rate AI assistant responses across multiple quality dimensions Köpf et al., NeurIPS 2023
pairwise-preference-rationale Compare two AI responses and select the better one while providing a written justification Wang et al., 2024
redteam-adversarial-eval Evaluate AI responses to adversarial prompts Ganguli et al., 2022
rewardbench-reward-model-eval Reward model evaluation through pairwise preference annotation Lambert et al., Findings NAACL 2025
saferlhf-dual-preference Safety-aware preference annotation with separate judgments for helpfulness and harmlessness Dai et al., ICLR 2024
spin-self-play Human vs. AI response discrimination for Self-Play Fine-Tuning, plus fluency ratings for both responses Chen et al., ICML 2024
summary-preference-comparison Pairwise comparison of text summaries with axis-based quality ratings Stiennon et al., NeurIPS 2020
ultrafeedback-multiaspect UltraFeedback is a 64k-prompt preference dataset where GPT-4 rates model responses on four aspects Cui et al., ICML 2024
ultrafeedback-rubric-evaluation Fine-grained response evaluation across 4 dimensions with written rationales Cui et al., ICML 2024
webgpt-comparison Compare answers with and without web search access Nakano et al., 2021

Quick Start

# Navigate to a specific task
cd preference-learning/hh-rlhf-pairwise-preference

# Run with Potato
potato start config.yaml

Common Annotation Patterns

Pairwise Preference

Compare two model responses and select the better one. Used in:

Multi-Attribute Rating

Rate responses on multiple quality dimensions. Used in:

Safety Classification

Identify harmful content and classify by harm type. Used in:

The Three H’s

Many RLHF tasks evaluate responses on:

  1. Helpful: Does the response help achieve the user’s goal?
  2. Honest: Is the information accurate and uncertainty acknowledged?
  3. Harmless: Does the response avoid causing harm?

Task Count

Total: 18 preference learning tasks