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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…

Large language models (LLMs) are fine-tuned using human comparison data with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) methods to make them better aligned with users' preferences. In contrast to LLMs, human preference learning has…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-11-23 Bram Wallace , Meihua Dang , Rafael Rafailov , Linqi Zhou , Aaron Lou , Senthil Purushwalkam , Stefano Ermon , Caiming Xiong , Shafiq Joty , Nikhil Naik

Alignment via reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has become the dominant paradigm for controlling the quality of outputs from large language models (LLMs). However, existing theories do not provide strong justification for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Jihun Yun , Juno Kim , Jongho Park , Junhyuck Kim , Jongha Jon Ryu , Jaewoong Cho , Kwang-Sung Jun

In this paper, we explore how directly pretraining a value model simplifies and stabilizes reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). In reinforcement learning, value estimation is the key to policy optimization, distinct from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Chenghua Huang , Lu Wang , Fangkai Yang , Pu Zhao , Zhixu Li , Qingwei Lin , Dongmei Zhang , Saravan Rajmohan , Qi Zhang

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has become the standard approach for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences, allowing LLMs to demonstrate remarkable abilities in various tasks. Existing methods work…

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is crucial for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human values. However, RLHF has been continuously challenged by its high complexity in implementation and computation consumption,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Yuhao Du , Zhuo Li , Pengyu Cheng , Zhihong Chen , Yuejiao Xie , Xiang Wan , Anningzhe Gao

Large Language Models (LLMs) can acquire extensive world knowledge through pre-training on large corpora. However, due to exposure to low-quality data, LLMs may exhibit harmful behavior without aligning with human values. The dominant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-11 Tianhao Wu , Banghua Zhu , Ruoyu Zhang , Zhaojin Wen , Kannan Ramchandran , Jiantao Jiao

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has been widely adopted for preference alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) due to its simplicity and effectiveness. However, DPO is derived as a bandit problem in which the whole response is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-16 Aiwei Liu , Haoping Bai , Zhiyun Lu , Yanchao Sun , Xiang Kong , Simon Wang , Jiulong Shan , Albin Madappally Jose , Xiaojiang Liu , Lijie Wen , Philip S. Yu , Meng Cao

The alignment of large language models with human values presents a critical challenge, particularly when balancing conflicting objectives like helpfulness and harmlessness. Existing approaches, such as Reinforcement Learning from Human…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Yuxuan Liu

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has recently emerged as a simple and effective alternative to reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) for aligning large language models (LLMs) with user preferences. However, existing DPO…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Jason Bohne , Pawel Polak , David Rosenberg , Brian Bloniarz , Gary Kazantsev

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has proven effectiveness for aligning text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models with human preferences. Although Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is widely adopted for its computational…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Jiamu Bai , Xin Yu , Meilong Xu , Weitao Lu , Xin Pan , Kiwan Maeng , Daniel Kifer , Jian Wang , Yu Wang

Offline algorithms for Reinforcement Learning from Human Preferences (RLHF), which use only a fixed dataset of sampled responses given an input, and preference feedback among these responses, have gained increasing prominence in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-12 Alekh Agarwal , Christoph Dann , Teodor V. Marinov

Optimizing large language models (LLMs) for multi-turn conversational outcomes remains a significant challenge, especially in goal-oriented settings like AI marketing or sales agents who facilitate transactions via messaging platforms. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Daniel R. Jiang , Jalaj Bhandari , Yukai Yang , Rémi Munos , Tyler Lu

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has been crucial to the recent success of Large Language Models (LLMs), however, it is often a complex and brittle process. In the classical RLHF framework, a reward model is first trained…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-06 Rafael Rafailov , Yaswanth Chittepu , Ryan Park , Harshit Sikchi , Joey Hejna , Bradley Knox , Chelsea Finn , Scott Niekum

Recent advances in alignment techniques such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) have improved the safety of large language models (LLMs). However,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Mengxuan Hu , Vivek V. Datla , Anoop Kumar , Zihan Guan , Sheng Li , Alfy Samuel , Daben Liu

Language model (LM) post-training (or alignment) involves maximizing a reward function that is derived from preference annotations. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a popular offline alignment method that trains a policy directly on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Adam Fisch , Jacob Eisenstein , Vicky Zayats , Alekh Agarwal , Ahmad Beirami , Chirag Nagpal , Pete Shaw , Jonathan Berant

Quality of datasets plays an important role in large language model (LLM) alignment. In collecting human feedback, however, preference flipping is ubiquitous and causes corruption in data annotation; the issue necessitates the alignment…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Yifan Xu , Xichen Ye , Yifan Chen , Qiaosheng Zhang

We apply preference modeling and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to finetune language models to act as helpful and harmless assistants. We find this alignment training improves performance on almost all NLP evaluations,…

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), the efficient alternative to PPO-based RLHF, falls short on knowledge-intensive generation: standard preference signals from human annotators or LLM judges exhibit a systematic verbosity bias that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Qiming Bao , Juho Leinonen , Paul Denny , Michael J. Witbrock

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become pivotal in advancing natural language processing, yet their potential to perpetuate biases poses significant concerns. This paper introduces a new framework employing Direct Preference Optimization…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-22 Ahmed Allam