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Equation 7 · Part 4 · How Constitutional AI Actually Constrains a Model's Behavior

subscript

(x,yw,yl)(x, y_w, y_l)
subscript

What this part means

The lower label selects a particular version, component, or indexed member of the quantity. For example, x₀ and xₜ can be values at different positions.

Its job in the formula

A subscript distinguishes a version, component, step, or member of a quantity. It does not automatically mean multiplication.

The passage around this formula

Nothing in that loss distinguishes where a pair came from; a human-labeled winner and an AI-labeled winner are interchangeable once written down as (x, ywy_w, yly_l) . That is the precise, narrow sense in which Constitutional AI “differs mechanically from plain RLHF”: it changes the labeling function for one half of one dataset, not the loss, not the optimizer, not the use of a KL penalty against the supervised policy. For the soft-labeled AI comparisons specifically, where the feedback model outputs a probability p of preferring response yAy_A over yBy_B rather than a hard choice, the corresponding cross-entropy term is

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Learn the underlying idea

A subscript is a label attached below a symbol. It often selects a time step, component, category, or member of a sequence.

Open the illustrated subscripts: which member of a family? guide →

Sources cited in the article section

These citations provide research context; check each source for the exact claim it supports.