HelpSteer3-Preference: Open Human-Annotated Preference Data across Diverse Tasks and Languages

Zhilin Wang, Jiaqi Zeng, Olivier Delalleau, Hoo-Chang Shin, Felipe Soares, Alexander Bukharin, Ellie Evans, Yi Dong, Oleksii Kuchaiev

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 38 (NeurIPS 2025) Datasets and Benchmarks Track

Preference datasets are essential for training general-domain, instruction-following language models with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). Each subsequent data release raises expectations for future data collection, meaning there is a constant need to advance the quality and diversity of openly available preference data. To address this need, we introduce HelpSteer3-Preference, a permissively licensed (CC-BY-4.0), high-quality, human-annotated preference dataset comprising of over 40,000 samples. These samples span diverse real-world applications of large language models (LLMs), including tasks relating to STEM, coding and multilingual scenarios. Using HelpSteer3-Preference, we train Reward Models (RMs) that achieve top performance on RM-Bench (82.4%) and JudgeBench (73.7%). This represents a substantial improvement (~10% absolute) over the previously best-reported results from existing RMs. We demonstrate HelpSteer3-Preference can also be applied to train Generative RMs and how policy models can be aligned with RLHF using our RMs.