cs.AIOct 15, 2026

CleanRM: Reward Modeling from Noisy Feedback with a Few Clean Feedback for RLHF

Authors: Licheng Pan, Haocheng Yang, Yuzhou Chen, Yichen Sun, Yuan Lu, Yunfei Teng, Jiajun Fan, Guangyi Liu, 

Organizations: Zhejiang University · Xiaohongshu Inc · National University of Singapore · New York University · 

Abstract

Feedback noise is pervasive in preference data, arising from subjective human judgments, annotation mistakes, and imperfect LLM judges. Standard reward modeling trained on such feedback yields a biased estimate of the clean risk. Although classical denoising methods are directly applicable to noisy feedback learning, they generally assume a uniform noise ratio across samples. However, this assumption fails for feedback data, where noise is intrinsically sample-wise. To address this challenge, we propose CleanRM, which uses a few clean feedback to calibrate sample-wise noise ratios via optimal transport. Specifically, CleanRM aligns the joint distribution of preferences reverted from noisy feedback with that of clean feedback and then trains the reward model using a noise-corrected surrogate loss. Theoretically, we prove that the resulting objective is unbiased with respect to the clean risk. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CleanRM outperforms state-of-the-art denoising baselines and yields more effective downstream RLHF alignment.

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