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We propose Soft Preference Optimization (SPO), a method for aligning generative models, such as Large Language Models (LLMs), with human preferences, without the need for a reward model. SPO optimizes model outputs directly over a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-07 Arsalan Sharifnassab , Saber Salehkaleybar , Sina Ghiassian , Surya Kanoria , Dale Schuurmans

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as the primary method for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. While it enables LLMs to achieve human-level alignment, it often incurs significant…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Shivank Garg , Ayush Singh , Shweta Singh , Paras Chopra

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has been popular for aligning text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models with human preferences. As a mainstream branch of RLHF, Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) offers a computationally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Jiaming Hu , Jiamu Bai , Haoyu Wang , Debarghya Mukherjee , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has become a prominent method for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences. While DPO has enabled significant progress in aligning English LLMs, multilingual preference alignment is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Wen Yang , Junhong Wu , Chen Wang , Chengqing Zong , Jiajun Zhang

Large foundation models pretrained on raw web-scale data are not readily deployable without additional step of extensive alignment to human preferences. Such alignment is typically done by collecting large amounts of pairwise comparisons…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-13 Daiwei Chen , Yi Chen , Aniket Rege , Ramya Korlakai Vinayak

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a widely used RL-free method for aligning language models from pairwise preferences, but it models preferences over full sequences even though generation is driven by per-token decisions. Existing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Truong Nguyen , Tien-Phat Nguyen , Linh Ngo Van , Duy Minh Ho Nguyen , Khoa D. Doan , Trung Le

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

This paper studies reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) for aligning large language models with human preferences. While RLHF has demonstrated promising results, many algorithms are highly sensitive to misspecifications in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-30 Erhan Xu , Kai Ye , Hongyi Zhou , Luhan Zhu , Francesco Quinzan , Chengchun Shi

The reward model (RM) plays a crucial role in aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences through Reinforcement Learning, where the Bradley-Terry (BT) objective has been recognized as simple yet powerful, specifically for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Zhuo Li , Yuege Feng , Dandan Guo , Jinpeng Hu , Anningzhe Gao , Xiang Wan

In the quest to advance human-centric natural language generation (NLG) systems, ensuring alignment between NLG models and human preferences is crucial. For this alignment, current popular methods leverage a reinforcement learning (RL)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Jiashuo Wang , Haozhao Wang , Shichao Sun , Wenjie Li

Learning from preference feedback has emerged as an essential step for improving the generation quality and performance of modern language models (LMs). Despite its widespread use, the way preference-based learning is applied varies wildly,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Hamish Ivison , Yizhong Wang , Jiacheng Liu , Zeqiu Wu , Valentina Pyatkin , Nathan Lambert , Noah A. Smith , Yejin Choi , Hannaneh Hajishirzi

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

Recently, there has been significant interest in replacing the reward model in Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) methods for Large Language Models (LLMs), such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and its variants. These…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-27 Jian Li , Haojing Huang , Yujia Zhang , Pengfei Xu , Xi Chen , Rui Song , Lida Shi , Jingwen Wang , Hao Xu

Generative Reward Models (GRMs) have demonstrated strong performance in reward modeling, due to their interpretability and potential for refinement through reinforcement learning (RL). However, widely used pairwise GRMs create a…

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has become a crucial technology for aligning language models with human values and intentions, enabling models to produce more helpful and harmless responses. Reward models are trained as…

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences is crucial in ensuring desirable and controllable model behaviors. Current methods, such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and Direct Preference Optimization…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Yang Zhao , Yixin Wang , Mingzhang Yin

Large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential in natural language processing tasks, but their application to machine translation (MT) remains challenging due to pretraining on English-centric data and the complexity of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-24 Guofeng Cui , Pichao Wang , Yang Liu , Zemian Ke , Zhu Liu , Vimal Bhat

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

If you tell a learning model that you prefer an alternative $a$ over another alternative $b$, then you probably expect the model to be monotone, that is, the valuation of $a$ increases, and that of $b$ decreases. Yet, perhaps surprisingly,…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-10-23 Julien Fageot , Peva Blanchard , Gilles Bareilles , Lê-Nguyên Hoang

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is an effective approach for aligning language models to human preferences. Central to RLHF is learning a reward function for scoring human preferences. Two main approaches for learning a…