English

Doubly Robust Alignment for Large Language Models

Machine Learning 2025-10-30 v2 Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning

Abstract

This paper studies reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) for aligning large language models with human preferences. While RLHF has demonstrated promising results, many algorithms are highly sensitive to misspecifications in the underlying preference model (e.g., the Bradley-Terry model), the reference policy, or the reward function, resulting in undesirable fine-tuning. To address model misspecification, we propose a doubly robust preference optimization algorithm that remains consistent when either the preference model or the reference policy is correctly specified (without requiring both). Our proposal demonstrates superior and more robust performance than state-of-the-art algorithms, both in theory and in practice. The code is available at https://github.com/DRPO4LLM/DRPO4LLM

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2506.01183,
  title  = {Doubly Robust Alignment for Large Language Models},
  author = {Erhan Xu and Kai Ye and Hongyi Zhou and Luhan Zhu and Francesco Quinzan and Chengchun Shi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.01183},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Accepted to NeurIPS 2025

R2 v1 2026-07-01T02:53:29.499Z