Rater State Bias in RLHF Preference Data: An Audit Framework

Abstract

arXiv:2607.16195v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We identify a structured confound in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). Pairwise preference labels are intended to reflect the compared outputs, but they may also reflect the rater's state during annotation. Under sustained stressful or distressing conditions, raters' preferences may shift over time. As a result, preference data can encode rater state alongside judgments about response quality. These shifts differ from ordinary disa