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Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and related methods align large language models from pairwise preferences by regularizing updates against a fixed reference policy. As the policy drifts, a static reference, however, can become…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Youngjae Cho , Jongsuk Kim , Ji-Hoon Kim

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and derivative techniques like Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) are task-alignment algorithms used to repurpose general, foundational models for specific tasks. We show that applying…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Kaden Uhlig , Joern Wuebker , Raphael Reinauer , John DeNero

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has been commonly used to align the behaviors of Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences. Recently, a popular alternative is Direct Policy Optimization (DPO), which replaces an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-03 Runsheng Yu , Yong Wang , Xiaoqi Jiao , Youzhi Zhang , James T. Kwok

Aligning large language models with human preferences is essential for improving interaction quality and safety by ensuring outputs better reflect human values. A promising strategy involves Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-12-17 Jiacong Zhou , Xianyun Wang , Min Zhang , Jun Yu

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

Direct alignment algorithms have proven an effective step for aligning language models to human-desired behaviors. Current variants of the Direct Preference Optimization objective have focused on a strict setting where all tokens are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Fenia Christopoulou , Ronald Cardenas , Gerasimos Lampouras , Haitham Bou-Ammar , Jun Wang

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has become a popular method for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) due to its stability and simplicity. However, it is also known to be sensitive to noise in the data and prone to overfitting.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Cheol Woo Kim , Shresth Verma , Mauricio Tec , Milind Tambe

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a promising solution to align large language models (LLMs) more closely with human values. Off-policy preference optimization, where the preference data is obtained from other models, is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-07 Wenxuan Zhou , Ravi Agrawal , Shujian Zhang , Sathish Reddy Indurthi , Sanqiang Zhao , Kaiqiang Song , Silei Xu , Chenguang Zhu

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences is commonly done via reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) or, more simply, via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). While DPO…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Abdulhady Abas Abdullah , Fatemeh Daneshfar , Seyedali Mirjalili , Mourad Oussalah

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

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive performance but lack the flexibility to adapt to human preferences quickly without retraining. In this work, we introduce Test-time Preference Optimization (TPO), a framework that aligns…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-23 Yafu Li , Xuyang Hu , Xiaoye Qu , Linjie Li , Yu Cheng

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human feedback is crucial for their development. Existing preference optimization methods such as DPO and KTO, while improved based on Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-23 Shuo Xie , Fangzhi Zhu , Jiahui Wang , Lulu Wen , Wei Dai , Xiaowei Chen , Junxiong Zhu , Kai Zhou , Bo Zheng

The generated responses of large language models (LLMs) are often fine-tuned to human preferences through a process called reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). As RLHF relies on a challenging training sequence, whereby a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Xiangkun Hu , Lemin Kong , Tong He , David Wipf

With the rapid development and widespread application of Large Language Models (LLMs), their potential safety risks have attracted widespread attention. Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has been adopted to enhance the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Shiji Zhao , Mengyang Wang , Shukun Xiong , Fangzhou Chen , Qihui Zhu , Shouwei Ruan , Yisong Xiao , Ranjie Duan , Xun Chen , XingXing Wei

Direct preference optimization (\texttt{DPO}) has emerged as a promising approach for solving the alignment problem in AI. In this paper, we make two counter-intuitive observations about \texttt{DPO}. First, we show that \texttt{DPO} loss…

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

The alignment of large language models with human values presents a critical challenge, particularly when balancing conflicting objectives like helpfulness and harmlessness. Existing approaches, such as Reinforcement Learning from Human…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Yuxuan Liu

The ability to train high-performing reward models with few-shot data is critical for enhancing the efficiency and scalability of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). We propose a data augmentation and expansion framework that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Yiyang Zhao , Huiyu Bai , Xuejiao Zhao

Most Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) adopt preference alignment techniques, e.g., DPO~\citep{rafailov2024dpo}, to optimize the reward margin between a winning response ($y_w$) and a losing response ($y_l$). However, the likelihood…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Xiaodong Wang , Jinfa Huang , Li Yuan , Peixi Peng

Many algorithms for aligning LLMs with human preferences assume that human preferences are binary and deterministic. However, human preferences can vary across individuals, and therefore should be represented distributionally. In this work,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-31 Hiroki Furuta , Kuang-Huei Lee , Shixiang Shane Gu , Yutaka Matsuo , Aleksandra Faust , Heiga Zen , Izzeddin Gur