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In information retrieval, training reranking models mainly focuses on two types of objectives: metric learning (e.g. contrastive loss to increase the predicted scores on relevant query-document pairs) and classification (binary label…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Ziqi Dai , Xin Zhang , Mingxin Li , Yanzhao Zhang , Dingkun Long , Pengjun Xie , Meishan Zhang , Wenjie Li , Min Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a cornerstone for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs), with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) serving as the de facto standard algorithm. Despite its ubiquity, we argue that the core ratio…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Penghui Qi , Xiangxin Zhou , Zichen Liu , Tianyu Pang , Chao Du , Min Lin , Wee Sun Lee

Alignment is a crucial step to enhance the instruction-following and conversational abilities of language models. Despite many recent work proposing new algorithms, datasets, and training pipelines, there is a lack of comprehensive studies…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-04 Xiao Yu , Qingyang Wu , Yu Li , Zhou Yu

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

Large Language Model (LLM) personalization aims to align model behaviors with individual user preferences. Existing methods often focus on isolated user histories, neglecting the essential role of inter-user differences. We propose C-BPO, a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Xilai Ma , Liye Zhao , Weijun Yao , Haibing Di , Wenya Wang , Jing Li

We propose probe-based data attribution, a method that traces behavioral changes in post-trained language models to responsible training datapoints. By computing activation-difference vectors for both test prompts and preference pairs and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Frank Xiao , Santiago Aranguri

Recent developments in Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) allow large language models (LLMs) to function as implicit ranking models by maximizing the margin between preferred and non-preferred responses. In practice, user feedback on such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Junda Wu , Rohan Surana , Zhouhang Xie , Yiran Shen , Yu Xia , Tong Yu , Ryan A. Rossi , Prithviraj Ammanabrolu , Julian McAuley

Text ranking is a critical task in information retrieval. Recent advances in pre-trained language models (PLMs), especially large language models (LLMs), present new opportunities for applying them to text ranking. While supervised…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Longhui Zhang , Yanzhao Zhang , Dingkun Long , Pengjun Xie , Meishan Zhang , Min Zhang

Aligning large language models (LLM) with human preference plays a key role in building modern generative models and can be achieved by reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Despite their superior performance, current RLHF…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-12 Kaixuan Ji , Jiafan He , Quanquan Gu

Human feedback plays a pivotal role in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, such feedback is often noisy or inconsistent, which can degrade the quality of reward models and hinder alignment. While various…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Samuel Yeh , Sharon Li

Human preference alignment is essential to improve the interaction quality of large language models (LLMs). Existing alignment methods depend on manually annotated preference data to guide the LLM optimization directions. However,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Pengyu Cheng , Yifan Yang , Jian Li , Yong Dai , Tianhao Hu , Peixin Cao , Nan Du , Xiaolong Li

Preference alignment is a critical step in making Large Language Models (LLMs) useful and aligned with (human) preferences. Existing approaches such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback or Direct Preference Optimization typically…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Lucio La Cava , Andrea Tagarelli

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex reasoning and text generation. However, these models can inadvertently generate unsafe or biased responses when prompted with problematic inputs, raising…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Avinash Amballa , Durga Sandeep Saluru , Gayathri Akkinapalli , Abhishek Sureddy , Akshay Kumar Sureddy

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is widely utilized in the Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) phase to align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences, thereby enhancing both their harmlessness and efficacy.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Wei Liu , Yang Bai , Chengcheng Han , Rongxiang Weng , Jun Xu , Xuezhi Cao , Jingang Wang , Xunliang Cai

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with general human preferences has been proved crucial in improving the interaction quality between LLMs and human. However, human values are inherently diverse among different individuals, making it…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-31 Jianfei Zhang , Jun Bai , Bei Li , Yanmeng Wang , Rumei Li , Chenghua Lin , Wenge Rong

Preference optimization techniques, such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), are frequently employed to enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in domains like mathematical reasoning and coding, typically…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-17 Fangkai Jiao , Geyang Guo , Xingxing Zhang , Nancy F. Chen , Shafiq Joty , Furu Wei

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

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with diverse and multifaceted user preferences is a fundamental challenge in personalized AI systems. Existing multi-objective alignment methods either rely on costly training or require pre-trained…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Linhao Luo , Thuy-Trang Vu , Van-Anh Nguyen , Junae Kim , Gholamreza Haffari , Dinh Phung

Large language models (LLMs) acquire extensive prior knowledge through large-scale pretraining and can be further enhanced via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training. A growing body of evidence has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Honglin Zhang , Qianyue Hao , Fengli Xu , Yong Li

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences in federated learning (FL) is challenging due to decentralized, privacy-sensitive, and highly non-IID preference data. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) offers an efficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Kewen Zhu , Liping Yi , Zhiming Zhao , Zhuang Qi , Han Yu , Qinghua Hu