Reinforcement learning based fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) on human preferences has been shown to enhance both their capabilities and safety behavior. However, in cases related to safety, without precise instructions to human annotators, the data collected may cause the model to become overly cautious, or to respond in an undesirable style, such as being judgmental. Additionally, as model capabilities and usage patterns evolve, there may be a costly need to add or relabel data to modify safety behavior. We propose a novel preference modeling approach that utilizes AI feedback and only requires a small amount of human data. Our method, Rule Based Rewards (RBR), uses a collection of rules for desired or undesired behaviors (e.g. refusals should not be judgmental) along with a LLM grader. In contrast to prior methods using AI feedback, our method uses fine-grained, composable, LLM-graded few-shot prompts as reward directly in RL training, resulting in greater control, accuracy and ease of updating. We show that RBRs are an effective training method, achieving an F1 score of 97.1, compared to a human-feedback baseline of 91.7, resulting in much higher safety-behavior accuracy through better balancing usefulness and safety.

Lagrangian methods are widely used algorithms for constrained optimization problems, but their learning dynamics exhibit oscillations and overshoot which, when applied to safe reinforcement learning, leads to constraint-violating behavior during agent training. We address this shortcoming by proposing a novel Lagrange multiplier update method that utilizes derivatives of the constraint function. We take a controls perspective, wherein the traditional Lagrange multiplier update behaves as \emph{integral} control; our terms introduce \emph{proportional} and \emph{derivative} control, achieving favorable learning dynamics through damping and predictive measures. We apply our PID Lagrangian methods in deep RL, setting a new state of the art in Safety Gym, a safe RL benchmark. Lastly, we introduce a new method to ease controller tuning by providing invariance to the relative numerical scales of reward and cost. Our extensive experiments demonstrate improved performance and hyperparameter robustness, while our algorithms remain nearly as simple to derive and implement as the traditional Lagrangian approach.

For many applications of reinforcement learning it can be more convenient to specify both a reward function and constraints, rather than trying to design behavior through the reward function. For example, systems that physically interact with or around humans should satisfy safety constraints. Recent advances in policy search algorithms (Mnih et al., 2016, Schulman et al., 2015, Lillicrap et al., 2016, Levine et al., 2016) have enabled new capabilities in high-dimensional control, but do not consider the constrained setting. We propose Constrained Policy Optimization (CPO), the first general-purpose policy search algorithm for constrained reinforcement learning with guarantees for near-constraint satisfaction at each iteration. Our method allows us to train neural network policies for high-dimensional control while making guarantees about policy behavior all throughout training. Our guarantees are based on a new theoretical result, which is of independent interest: we prove a bound relating the expected returns of two policies to an average divergence between them. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on simulated robot locomotion tasks where the agent must satisfy constraints motivated by safety.