Position: The Complexity of Perfect AI Alignment -- Formalizing the RLHF Trilemma

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is widely used for aligning large language models, yet practitioners face a persistent puzzle: improving safety often reduces fairness, scaling to diverse populations becomes computationally intractable, and making systems robust often amplifies majority biases. We formalize this tension as the Alignment Trilemma: no RLHF system can simultaneously achieve (i) epsilon-representativeness across diverse human values, (ii) polynomial tractability in sample and compute complexity, and (iii) delta-robustness against adversarial perturbations and distribution shift. Through a complexity-theoretic analysis integrating statistical learning theory and robust optimization, we prove that achieving both representativeness (epsilon<= 0.01) and robustness (delta<= 0.001) for global-scale populations requires Omega(2^{d_context}) operations, which is super-polynomial in the context dimensionality. We show that current RLHF implementations resolve this trilemma by sacrificing representativeness: they collect only 10^3--10^4 samples from homogeneous annotator pools while 10^7--10^8 samples are needed for true global representation. Our framework provides a unified explanation for documented RLHF pathologies including preference collapse, sycophancy, and systematic bias amplification. We conclude with concrete directions for navigating these fundamental trade-offs through strategic relaxations of alignment requirements.

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04If the contribution is primarily a new model architecture, the paper should describe the architecture clearly and fully
05Guidelines: • The answer NA means that the core method development in this research does not involve LLMs as any important, original, or non-standard components. • Please refer to our LLM policyneurips.cc/Conferences/2025/LLM for what should or should not be described. 17
06problems and fundamental limitations of reinforcement learningOpen

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