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Offline reinforcement learning struggles with distributional shift and constrained performance due to static dataset limitations, while online RL demands prohibitive environment interactions. The recent advent of hybrid offline-to-online…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Qisai Liu , Zhanhong Jiang , Joshua Russell Waite , Aditya Balu , Cody Fleming , Soumik Sarkar

The alignment of language models~(LMs) with human preferences is critical for building reliable AI systems. The problem is typically framed as optimizing an LM policy to maximize the expected reward that reflects human preferences.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Zetian Sun , Dongfang Li , Xuhui Chen , Baotian Hu , Min Zhang

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a promising approach for aligning large language models with human preferences. While prior work mainly extends DPO from the aspect of the objective function, we instead improve DPO from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Xun Deng , Han Zhong , Rui Ai , Fuli Feng , Zheng Wang , Xiangnan He

This study evaluates Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and its variants for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences, testing three configurations: (1) with Supervised Fine Tuning (SFT), (2) without SFT, and (3)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Amir Saeidi , Shivanshu Verma , Md Nayem Uddin , Chitta Baral

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

Learning from human preference is a paradigm used in large-scale language model (LLM) fine-tuning step to better align pretrained LLM to human preference for downstream task. In the past it uses reinforcement learning from human feedback…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-09-02 Shiming Xie , Hong Chen , Fred Yu , Zeye Sun , Xiuyu Wu , Yingfan Hu

Offline preference optimization allows fine-tuning large models directly from offline data, and has proved effective in recent alignment practices. We propose generalized preference optimization (GPO), a family of offline losses…

We present a fine-grained theoretical analysis of the performance gap between two-stage reinforcement learning from human feedback~(RLHF) and direct preference optimization~(DPO). Our study decomposes this gap into two sources: the explicit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Ruizhe Shi , Minhak Song , Runlong Zhou , Zihan Zhang , Maryam Fazel , Simon S. Du

Large language models in the past have typically relied on some form of reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) to better align model responses with human preferences. However, because of oft-observed instabilities when…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-15 Xiangkun Hu , Tong He , David Wipf

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences is critical for real-world deployment, yet existing methods like RLHF face computational and stability challenges. While DPO establishes an offline paradigm with single…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Junkang Wu , Kexin Huang , Xue Wang , Jinyang Gao , Bolin Ding , Jiancan Wu , Xiangnan He , Xiang Wang

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a stable, scalable, and efficient solution for language model alignment. Despite its empirical success, the optimization properties, particularly the impact of samplers on its convergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Ruizhe Shi , Runlong Zhou , Simon S. Du

While reinforcement learning methods such as Group Relative Preference Optimization (GRPO) have significantly enhanced Large Language Models, adapting them to diffusion models remains challenging. In particular, GRPO demands a stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Yihong Luo , Tianyang Hu , Jing Tang

Direct Preference Optimisation (DPO) is effective at significantly improving the performance of large language models (LLMs) on downstream tasks such as reasoning, summarisation, and alignment. Using pairs of preferred and dispreferred…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-04 Arka Pal , Deep Karkhanis , Samuel Dooley , Manley Roberts , Siddartha Naidu , Colin White

At the forefront of state-of-the-art human alignment methods are preference optimization methods (*PO). Prior research has often concentrated on identifying the best-performing method, typically involving a grid search over hyperparameters,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-30 Kian Ahrabian , Xihui Lin , Barun Patra , Vishrav Chaudhary , Alon Benhaim , Jay Pujara , Xia Song

Preference optimization is crucial for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values and intentions. A significant challenge in this process is the distribution mismatch between pre-collected offline preference data and the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Junming Yang , Ning Xu , Biao Liu , Shiqi Qiao , Xin Geng

Direct preference optimization (DPO) is a form of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) where the policy is learned directly from preferential feedback. Although many models of human preferences exist, the critical task of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Branislav Kveton , Xintong Li , Julian McAuley , Ryan Rossi , Jingbo Shang , Junda Wu , Tong Yu

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is a challenging setting where existing off-policy actor-critic methods perform poorly due to the overestimation of out-of-distribution state-action pairs. Thus, various additional augmentations are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-23 Zifeng Zhuang , Kun Lei , Jinxin Liu , Donglin Wang , Yilang Guo

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and its variants have become the de facto standards for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences or specific goals. However, DPO requires high-quality preference data and suffers from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Zhuotong Chen , Fang Liu , Jennifer Zhu , Wanyu Du , Yanjun Qi

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human feedback is crucial for their development. Existing preference optimization methods such as DPO and KTO, while improved based on Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-23 Shuo Xie , Fangzhi Zhu , Jiahui Wang , Lulu Wen , Wei Dai , Xiaowei Chen , Junxiong Zhu , Kai Zhou , Bo Zheng

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