Equation 5 · Part 9 · The Main Technical Approaches to AI Alignment, Compared
subtraction
subtraction
What this part means
Subtract the following term or group from the preceding one. A leading minus marks a negative quantity.
Its job in the formula
Subtract the following term or group from the preceding one. A leading minus marks a negative quantity.
Full expression→subtraction→Article meaning
The passage around this formula
Constitutional AI keeps RLHF’s reward-model-and-KL-penalty backbone intact and changes where the comparison labels come from. Bai and colleagues describe a two-phase method: a supervised phase in which the model critiques and revises its own responses against a written set of principles, and a reinforcement phase in which a model, rather than a human, judges which of two candidate responses better satisfies those principles — producing an AI-generated preference dataset that trains the reward model [ 6 ] . Formally, this changes only the source of the comparison label. The Bradley–Terry equation above is unchanged in form; what changes is that the probability being fitted is now [displayed…
Learn the underlying idea
Addition combines quantities; subtraction measures the signed difference between them. Parentheses show what is combined before the rest of the expression is evaluated.
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Sources cited in the surrounding passage
- [6] Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback ↗
- [7] RLAIF vs. RLHF: Scaling Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback with AI Feedback ↗
These citations provide research context; check each source for the exact claim it supports.