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Equation 9 · How Constitutional AI Actually Constrains a Model's Behavior

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yAy_A

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yAy_A

Symbol y_A

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subscript

subscript

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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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