@inproceedings{gong-etal-2026-influence,
    title = "Influence-based Online Experience Selection for Effective {RLHF}",
    author = "Gong, Yifan  and
      Yao, Jing  and
      Wang, Xiting  and
      Wang, Xunlong  and
      Yi, Xiaoyuan  and
      Xie, Xing",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.2206/",
    pages = "47755--47771",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
    abstract = "Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a crucial technique for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, existing RLHF methods face key challenges, including poor sample efficiency, high computational overhead, and slow convergence. Recent studies highlight the importance of data selection in RL, but how to effectively select the most beneficial experiences for RL training remains an open problem. Existing data selection methods for RL rely on heuristic metrics, failing to establish an interpretable connection between data and optimization objectives. To address this problem, we propose InfOES (Influence-based Online Experience Selection), a novel data selection method for RLHF that dynamically estimates the influence of individual training samples on policy optimization. By incorporating data attribution into the policy gradient, InfOES can identify and filter out detrimental samples on the fly, ensuring effective convergence toward alignment objectives. Our approach is compatible with various RL algorithms (e.g., PPO, GRPO, REINFORCE++). Extensive experiments demonstrate that InfOES significantly enhances training effectiveness, achieving superior alignment performance with fewer optimization steps."
}