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Related papers: Bridging SFT and DPO for Diffusion Model Alignment…

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Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) aligns language models using pairwise preference comparisons, offering a simple and effective alternative to Reinforcement Learning (RL) from human feedback. However, in many practical settings, training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Ning Liu , Chuanneng Sun , Kristina Klinkner , Shervin Malmasi

Post-training of large language models routinely interleaves supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with reinforcement learning (RL). These two methods have different objectives: SFT minimizes the cross-entropy loss between model outputs and expert…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Xueyan Niu , Bo Bai , Wei Han , Weixi Zhang

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

The field of preference optimization has made outstanding contributions to the alignment of language models with human preferences. Despite these advancements, recent methods still rely heavily on substantial paired (labeled) feedback data,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Seonggyun Lee , Sungjun Lim , Seojin Park , Soeun Cheon , Kyungwoo Song

The alignment of large language models (LLMs) with human preferences remains a key challenge. While post-training techniques like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) have achieved…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-11 Qingyu Yin , Chak Tou Leong , Minjun Zhu , Hanqi Yan , Qiang Zhang , Yulan He , Wenjie Li , Jun Wang , Yue Zhang , Linyi Yang

Generative speech enhancement offers a promising alternative to traditional discriminative methods by modeling the distribution of clean speech conditioned on noisy inputs. Post-training alignment via reinforcement learning (RL) effectively…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-01-26 Haoxu Wang , Biao Tian , Yiheng Jiang , Zexu Pan , Shengkui Zhao , Bin Ma , Daren Chen , Xiangang Li

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a de-facto approach for aligning language models with human preferences. Recent work has shown DPO's effectiveness relies on training data quality. In particular, clear quality differences…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-28 Nirav Diwan , Tolga Ergen , Dongsub Shim , Honglak Lee

Reinforcement learning (RL)-based fine-tuning has emerged as a powerful approach for aligning diffusion models with black-box objectives. Proximal policy optimization (PPO) is a popular choice of method for policy optimization. While…

Recent advances in diffusion models have improved Real-World Image Super-Resolution (Real-ISR), but existing methods lack human feedback integration, risking misalignment with human preference and may leading to artifacts, hallucinations…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Miaomiao Cai , Simiao Li , Wei Li , Xudong Huang , Hanting Chen , Jie Hu , Yunhe Wang

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is the standard approach for binary classification tasks such as toxicity detection, factuality verification, and causal inference. However, SFT often performs poorly in real-world settings with label noise,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Punya Syon Pandey , Zhijing Jin

The post-training of LLMs, which typically consists of the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stage and the preference learning stage (RLHF or DPO), is crucial to effective and safe LLM applications. The widely adopted approach in post-training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Heshan Fernando , Han Shen , Parikshit Ram , Yi Zhou , Horst Samulowitz , Nathalie Baracaldo , Tianyi Chen

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in generating realistic and versatile images from text prompts. Inspired by the recent advancements of language models, there is an increasing interest in further improving the models by…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Binxu Li , Minkai Xu , Jiaqi Han , Meihua Dang , Stefano Ermon

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) has become a crucial step for aligning pretrained large language models (LLMs) using supervised datasets of input-output pairs. However, despite being supervised, SFT is inherently limited by its generative…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Siqi Guo , Ilgee Hong , Vicente Balmaseda , Changlong Yu , Liang Qiu , Xin Liu , Haoming Jiang , Tuo Zhao , Tianbao Yang

Modern preference alignment methods, such as DPO, rely on divergence regularization to a reference model for training stability-but this creates a fundamental problem we call "reference mismatch." In this paper, we investigate the negative…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Jiwoo Hong , Sayak Paul , Noah Lee , Kashif Rasul , James Thorne , Jongheon Jeong

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is computationally efficient but often yields inferior generalization compared to reinforcement learning (RL). This gap is primarily driven by RL's use of on-policy data. We propose a framework to bridge this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Miaosen Zhang , Yishan Liu , Shuxia Lin , Xu Yang , Qi Dai , Chong Luo , Weihao Jiang , Peng Hou , Anxiang Zeng , Xin Geng , Baining Guo

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a predominant alignment method for diffusion models, facilitating off-policy training without explicit reward modeling. However, its reliance on large-scale, high-quality human preference…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Khiem Pham , Quang Nguyen , Tung Nguyen , Jingsen Zhu , Michele Santacatterina , Dimitris Metaxas , Ramin Zabih

This study investigates the effectiveness of reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning techniques on a compact language model (Qwen2.5-0.5B Base) for two challenging tasks: instruction following and mathematical reasoning. We compare…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Yifu Han , Geo Zhang

Recent studies suggest that Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) is inherently more resilient to catastrophic forgetting than Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). However, whether RFT (e.g., GRPO) can effectively overcome forgetting in challenging…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Meng Lou , Hanzhong Guo , Linwei Chen , Yizhou Yu

Large language models (LLMs) trained via pretraining and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) can still produce harmful and misaligned outputs, or struggle in domains like math and coding. Reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training methods,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Zhichao Wang , Kiran Ramnath , Bin Bi , Shiva Kumar Pentyala , Sougata Chaudhuri , Shubham Mehrotra , Zixu , Zhu , Xiang-Bo Mao , Sitaram Asur , Na , Cheng

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a powerful approach to align text-to-image (T2I) models with human feedback. Unfortunately, successful application of DPO to T2I models requires a huge amount of resources to collect and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Shyamgopal Karthik , Huseyin Coskun , Zeynep Akata , Sergey Tulyakov , Jian Ren , Anil Kag