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We study how data of higher quality can be leveraged to improve performance in Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), aiming to understand its impact on DPO training dynamics. Our analyses show that both the solution space and the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Kyung Rok Kim , Yumo Bai , Chonghuan Wang , Guanting Chen

Direct alignment algorithms such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) fine-tune models based on preference data, using only supervised learning instead of two-stage reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF). We show that DPO…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Aditya Gopalan , Sayak Ray Chowdhury , Debangshu Banerjee

For aligning large language models (LLMs), prior work has leveraged reinforcement learning via human feedback (RLHF) or variations of direct preference optimization (DPO). While DPO offers a simpler framework based on maximum likelihood…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Anirudhan Badrinath , Prabhat Agarwal , Jiajing Xu

A critical component of the current generation of language models is preference alignment, which aims to precisely control the model's behavior to meet human needs and values. The most notable among such methods is Reinforcement Learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Oh Joon Kwon , Daiki E. Matsunaga , Kee-Eung Kim

Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) enhances the alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, its limitations have led to the development of Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), an RL-free approach designed to overcome…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Amir Saeidi , Shivanshu Verma , Aswin RRV , Kashif Rasul , Chitta Baral

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) simplifies reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) for large language models (LLMs) by directly optimizing human preferences without an explicit reward model. We find that during DPO training,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Junshu Pan , Wei Shen , Shulin Huang , Qiji Zhou , Yue Zhang

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (\textbf{RLHF}) has emerged as a dominant approach for aligning LLM outputs with human preferences. Inspired by the success of RLHF, we study the performance of multiple algorithms that learn from…

In this paper, we introduce \emph{refined Direct Preference Optimization} (rDPO), a method for improving the behavioral alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) without the need for human-annotated data. The method involves creating…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-14 Víctor Gallego

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a key technique for aligning the output of large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. To learn the reward function, most existing RLHF algorithms use the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-11 Kai Ye , Hongyi Zhou , Jin Zhu , Francesco Quinzan , Chengchun Shi

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences has gained significant attention, with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) as a standard yet computationally expensive method and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) as a more…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Yuzi Yan , Yibo Miao , Jialian Li , Yipin Zhang , Jian Xie , Zhijie Deng , Dong Yan

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has recently emerged as a popular approach to improve reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF), leading to better techniques to fine-tune large language models (LLM). A weakness of DPO, however,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-21 Haoxian Chen , Hanyang Zhao , Henry Lam , David Yao , Wenpin Tang

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a reliable approach to aligning large language models (LLMs) to human preferences. Among the plethora of RLHF techniques, proximal policy optimization (PPO) is of the most…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-06 Banghua Zhu , Hiteshi Sharma , Felipe Vieira Frujeri , Shi Dong , Chenguang Zhu , Michael I. Jordan , Jiantao Jiao

Traditional RLHF-based LLM alignment methods explicitly maximize the expected rewards from a separate reward model. More recent supervised alignment methods like Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) circumvent this phase to avoid problems…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-03 Abhijnan Nath , Changsoo Jung , Ethan Seefried , Nikhil Krishnaswamy

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a promising solution to align large language models (LLMs) more closely with human values. Off-policy preference optimization, where the preference data is obtained from other models, is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-07 Wenxuan Zhou , Ravi Agrawal , Shujian Zhang , Sathish Reddy Indurthi , Sanqiang Zhao , Kaiqiang Song , Silei Xu , Chenguang Zhu

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as an effective approach to aligning large language models (LLMs) to human preferences. RLHF contains three steps, i.e., human preference collecting, reward learning, and policy…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-29 Hao Lang , Fei Huang , Yongbin Li

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has demonstrated great promise in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preference. Depending on the availability of preference data, both online and offline RLHF are active areas…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-20 Shicong Cen , Jincheng Mei , Katayoon Goshvadi , Hanjun Dai , Tong Yang , Sherry Yang , Dale Schuurmans , Yuejie Chi , Bo Dai

Preference-based reinforcement learning (RL) is a key paradigm for aligning policies with human judgments, yet its theoretical behavior in distributed settings where preference data are fragmented across heterogeneous users remains poorly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Zhanhong Jiang

Direct preference optimization (\texttt{DPO}) has emerged as a promising approach for solving the alignment problem in AI. In this paper, we make two counter-intuitive observations about \texttt{DPO}. First, we show that \texttt{DPO} loss…

Normative theories allow one to elicit key parts of a ML algorithm from first principles, which is crucial at a time of championed scrutiny for ML work. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) cleverly bypasses reward modeling by making an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Wenxuan Zhou , Shujian Zhang , Brice Magdalou , John Lambert , Ehsan Amid , Richard Nock , Andrew Hard

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a central framework for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. Despite its practical success, RLHF raises fundamental statistical questions because it…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-06 Pangpang Liu , Chengchun Shi , Will Wei Sun