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Direct alignment methods are increasingly used for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, these methods suffer from the issues of verbosity and likelihood displacement, which can be driven by the noisy…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Peter Chen , Xi Chen , Wotao Yin , Tianyi Lin

The alignment of large language models (LLMs) often assumes that using more clean data yields better outcomes, overlooking the match between model capacity and example difficulty. Challenging this, we propose a new principle: Preference…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-15 Chengqian Gao , Haonan Li , Liu Liu , Zeke Xie , Peilin Zhao , Zhiqiang Xu

Normative theories allow one to elicit key parts of a ML algorithm from first principles, which is crucial at a time of championed scrutiny for ML work. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) cleverly bypasses reward modeling by making an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Wenxuan Zhou , Shujian Zhang , Brice Magdalou , John Lambert , Ehsan Amid , Richard Nock , Andrew Hard

Direct preference optimization (DPO) is a successful fine-tuning strategy for aligning large language models with human preferences without the need to train a reward model or employ reinforcement learning. DPO, as originally formulated,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Afra Amini , Tim Vieira , Ryan Cotterell

While alignment algorithms are now commonly used to tune pre-trained language models towards a user's preferences, we lack explanations for the underlying mechanisms in which models become ``aligned'', thus making it difficult to explain…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-05 Andrew Lee , Xiaoyan Bai , Itamar Pres , Martin Wattenberg , Jonathan K. Kummerfeld , Rada Mihalcea

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) guides large language models (LLMs) to generate recommendations aligned with user historical behavior distributions by minimizing preference alignment loss. However, our systematic empirical research and…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Chu Zhao , Enneng Yang , Jianzhe Zhao , Guibing Guo

Direct Alignment Algorithms (DAAs), such as Direct Preference Optimisation (DPO) and Identity Preference Optimisation (IPO), have emerged as alternatives to online Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) algorithms such as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-21 Zhengyan Shi , Sander Land , Acyr Locatelli , Matthieu Geist , Max Bartolo

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a widely adopted offline algorithm for preference-based reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), designed to improve training simplicity and stability by redefining reward functions.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Gengxu Li , Tingyu Xia , Yi Chang , Yuan Wu

Aligning the output of Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences (e.g., by means of reinforcement learning with human feedback, or RLHF) is essential for ensuring their effectiveness in real-world scenarios. Despite significant…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Pietro Bernardelle , Gianluca Demartini

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has become a standard recipe for aligning large language models, yet it is still unclear what kind of change it actually induces inside the network. This paper argues that DPO does not rewrite a models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Samarth Raina , Saksham Aggarwal , Aman Chadha , Vinija Jain , Amitava Das

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a simple and effective approach for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences, bypassing the need for a learned reward model. Despite its growing adoption, a fundamental…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Yu Pan , Zhongze Cai , Guanting Chen , Huaiyang Zhong , Chonghuan Wang

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

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), which derives reward signals directly from pairwise preference data, has shown its effectiveness on aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences. Despite its widespread use across…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-09 Duanyu Feng , Bowen Qin , Chen Huang , Zheng Zhang , Wenqiang Lei

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

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a more computationally efficient alternative to Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), eliminating the need for reward models and online…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Xin Mao , Feng-Lin Li , Huimin Xu , Wei Zhang , Wang Chen , Anh Tuan Luu

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a prominent algorithm for the direct and robust alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences, offering a more straightforward alternative to the complex Reinforcement…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Junru Lu , Jiazheng Li , Siyu An , Meng Zhao , Yulan He , Di Yin , Xing Sun

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as an important approach for learning from human preferences in aligning large language models (LLMs). However, collecting human preference data is costly and inefficient, motivating methods…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Jiacheng Guo , Zihao Li , Jiahao Qiu , Yue Wu , Mengdi Wang

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) to human preferences in content, style, and presentation is challenging, in part because preferences are varied, context-dependent, and sometimes inherently ambiguous. While successful, Reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Sam Houliston , Alizée Pace , Alexander Immer , Gunnar Rätsch

Preference learning algorithms (e.g., RLHF and DPO) are frequently used to steer LLMs to produce generations that are more preferred by humans, but our understanding of their inner workings is still limited. In this work, we study the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Angelica Chen , Sadhika Malladi , Lily H. Zhang , Xinyi Chen , Qiuyi Zhang , Rajesh Ranganath , Kyunghyun Cho

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