Scalable Valuation of Human Feedback through Provably Robust Model Alignment
Abstract
Despite the importance of aligning language models with human preferences, crowd-sourced human feedback is often noisy -- for example, preferring less desirable responses -- posing a fundamental challenge to alignment. A truly robust alignment objective should yield identical model parameters even under severe label noise, a property known as redescending. We prove that no existing alignment methods satisfy this property. To address this, we propose H\"older-DPO, the first principled alignment loss with a provable redescending property, enabling estimation of the clean data distribution from noisy feedback. The aligned model estimates the likelihood of clean data, providing a theoretically grounded metric for dataset valuation that identifies the location and fraction of mislabels. This metric is gradient-free, enabling scalable and automated human feedback valuation without costly manual verification or clean validation dataset. H\"older-DPO achieves state-of-the-art robust alignment performance while accurately detecting mislabels in controlled datasets. Finally, applied to Anthropic HH-RLHF dataset, it reveals substantial noise levels and removing these mislabels significantly improves alignment performance across methods. The code is available at https://github.com/ma921/HolderDPO.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2505.17859,
title = {Scalable Valuation of Human Feedback through Provably Robust Model Alignment},
author = {Masahiro Fujisawa and Masaki Adachi and Michael A. Osborne},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.17859},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
Accepted by the 39th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS2025), 49 pages, 7 figures