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Human alignment in large language models (LLMs) is an active area of research. A recent groundbreaking work, direct preference optimization (DPO), has greatly simplified the process from past work in reinforcement learning from human…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-10 Changyu Chen , Zichen Liu , Chao Du , Tianyu Pang , Qian Liu , Arunesh Sinha , Pradeep Varakantham , Min Lin

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has been successfully used to align large language models (LLMs) according to human preferences, and more recently it has also been applied to improving the quality of text-to-image diffusion models.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Shivanshu Shekhar , Shreyas Singh , Tong Zhang

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

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) improves the alignment of large language models (LLMs) with human values by training directly on human preference datasets, eliminating the need for reward models. However, due to the presence of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Biqing Qi , Pengfei Li , Fangyuan Li , Junqi Gao , Kaiyan Zhang , Bowen Zhou

We study an LLM fine-tuning task for designing reward functions for sequential resource allocation problems in public health, guided by human preferences expressed in natural language. This setting presents a challenging testbed for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Cheol Woo Kim , Shresth Verma , Mauricio Tec , Milind Tambe

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

As the era of large language models (LLMs) unfolds, Preference Optimization (PO) methods have become a central approach to aligning LLMs with human preferences and improving performance. We propose Maximum a Posteriori Preference…

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

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

Recent advancements in large language model alignment leverage token-level supervisions to perform fine-grained preference optimization. However, existing token-level alignment methods either optimize on all available tokens, which can be…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-07 Kailai Yang , Zhiwei Liu , Qianqian Xie , Jimin Huang , Erxue Min , Sophia Ananiadou

The rapidly increasing capabilities of large language models (LLMs) raise an urgent need to align AI systems with diverse human preferences to simultaneously enhance their usefulness and safety, despite the often conflicting nature of these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-06 Zixuan Liu , Xiaolin Sun , Zizhan Zheng

DPO has become a widely adopted alternative to RLHF for aligning LLMs with human preferences, eliminating the need for a separate reward model or RL loop. Recent theoretical analysis uncovers an asymmetric gradient behavior in DPO: the loss…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Shaolong Chen , Madalina Ciobanu , Qingqing Mao , Ritankar Das

How can Large Language Models (LLMs) be aligned with human intentions and values? A typical solution is to gather human preference on model outputs and finetune the LLMs accordingly while ensuring that updates do not deviate too far from a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Hung Le , Quan Tran , Dung Nguyen , Kien Do , Saloni Mittal , Kelechi Ogueji , Svetha Venkatesh

Preference learning is a key technology for aligning language models with human values. Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a model-based algorithm to optimize preference learning, which first fits a reward model for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-26 Zaifan Jiang , Xing Huang , Chao Wei

Direct alignment algorithms such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) fine-tune models based on preference data, using only supervised learning instead of two-stage reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF). We show that DPO…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Aditya Gopalan , Sayak Ray Chowdhury , Debangshu Banerjee

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has recently emerged as a popular approach to improve reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF), leading to better techniques to fine-tune large language models (LLM). A weakness of DPO, however,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-21 Haoxian Chen , Hanyang Zhao , Henry Lam , David Yao , Wenpin Tang

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

Using reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) has shown significant promise in fine-tuning diffusion models. Previous methods start by training a reward model that aligns with human preferences, then leverage RL techniques to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-26 Kai Yang , Jian Tao , Jiafei Lyu , Chunjiang Ge , Jiaxin Chen , Qimai Li , Weihan Shen , Xiaolong Zhu , Xiu Li

The widespread application of large language models (LLMs) raises increasing demands on ensuring safety or imposing constraints, such as reducing harmful content and adhering to predefined rules. While there have been several works studying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Yihan Du , Seo Taek Kong , R. Srikant

We study how data of higher quality can be leveraged to improve performance in Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), aiming to understand its impact on DPO training dynamics. Our analyses show that both the solution space and the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Kyung Rok Kim , Yumo Bai , Chonghuan Wang , Guanting Chen