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Improving the multi-step reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) with offline reinforcement learning (RL) is essential for quickly adapting them to complex tasks. While Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has shown promise in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Huaijie Wang , Shibo Hao , Hanze Dong , Shenao Zhang , Yilin Bao , Ziran Yang , Yi Wu

Iterative alignment methods based on purely greedy updates are remarkably effective in practice, yet existing theoretical guarantees of \(O(\log T)\) KL-regularized regret can seem pessimistic relative to their empirical performance. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Enoch Hyunwook Kang

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a powerful paradigm for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) to human preferences in Machine Translation (MT), but current methods are hindered by two fundamental challenges: (1) flawed reward…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Hao Wang , Linlong Xu , Heng Liu , Yangyang Liu , Xiaohu Zhao , Bo Zeng , Liangying Shao , Longyue Wang , Weihua Luo , Kaifu Zhang

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

Offline reinforcement learning (RL), also known as batch RL, aims to optimize policy from a large pre-recorded dataset without interaction with the environment. This setting offers the promise of utilizing diverse, pre-collected datasets to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-05 Qiang He , Xinwen Hou

We introduce ConfPO, a method for preference learning in Large Language Models (LLMs) that identifies and optimizes preference-critical tokens based solely on the training policy's confidence, without requiring any auxiliary models or…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-13 Hee Suk Yoon , Eunseop Yoon , Mark Hasegawa-Johnson , Sungwoong Kim , Chang D. Yoo

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has shown great potential in fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) to align with human preferences. Existing methods perform preference alignment from a fixed dataset, which can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Chenjia Bai , Yang Zhang , Shuang Qiu , Qiaosheng Zhang , Kang Xu , Xuelong Li

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and its variants have become increasingly popular for aligning language models with human preferences. These methods aim to teach models to better distinguish between chosen (or preferred) and rejected…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-09 Xiliang Yang , Feng Jiang , Qianen Zhang , Lei Zhao , Xiao Li

Fine-tuning pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) is essential to align them with human values and intentions. This process often utilizes methods like pairwise comparisons and KL divergence against a reference LLM, focusing on the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-02 Yongcheng Zeng , Guoqing Liu , Weiyu Ma , Ning Yang , Haifeng Zhang , Jun Wang

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

We study offline learning in KL-regularized two-player zero-sum games, where policies are optimized with respect to a fixed reference policy through KL regularization. Prior work relies on pessimistic value estimation to handle distribution…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Yuheng Zhang , Claire Chen , Nan Jiang

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO)-based reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a widely adopted paradigm for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, its training pipeline suffers from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Kaizhuo Yan , Yingjie Yu , Yifan Yu , Haizhong Zheng , Fan Lai

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a standard approach for fine-tuning large language models to follow instructions. As part of this process, learned reward models are used to approximately model human preferences.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Thomas Coste , Usman Anwar , Robert Kirk , David Krueger

Learning from human preferences is crucial for language models (LMs) to effectively cater to human needs and societal values. Previous research has made notable progress by leveraging human feedback to follow instructions. However, these…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Jian Hu , Li Tao , June Yang , Chandler Zhou

In this paper, we take a step towards a deeper understanding of learning from human preferences by systematically comparing the paradigm of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) with the recently proposed paradigm of direct…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Andi Nika , Debmalya Mandal , Parameswaran Kamalaruban , Georgios Tzannetos , Goran Radanović , Adish Singla

Contrastive learning models have demonstrated impressive abilities to capture semantic similarities by aligning representations in the embedding space. However, their performance can be limited by the quality of the training data and its…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-27 Amirabbas Afzali , Borna Khodabandeh , Ali Rasekh , Mahyar JafariNodeh , Sepehr kazemi , Simon Gottschalk

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has shown promise in aligning large language models (LLMs). Yet its reliance on a singular reward model often overlooks the diversity of human preferences. Recent approaches address this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-23 Tianze Wang , Dongnan Gui , Yifan Hu , Shuhang Lin , Linjun Zhang

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values is an increasingly critical step in post-training. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a simple, yet effective alternative to reinforcement learning from human feedback…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Yifan Wang , Runjin Chen , Bolian Li , David Cho , Yihe Deng , Ruqi Zhang , Tianlong Chen , Zhangyang Wang , Ananth Grama , Junyuan Hong

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

Standard reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) trains a reward model on pairwise preference data and then uses it for policy optimization. However, while reward models are optimized to capture relative preferences, existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Kyuseong Choi , Dwaipayan Saha , Woojeong Kim , Anish Agarwal , Raaz Dwivedi