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Related papers: Direct Alignment with Heterogeneous Preferences

200 papers

Learning of preference models from human feedback has been central to recent advances in artificial intelligence. Motivated by the cost of obtaining high-quality human annotations, we study efficient human preference elicitation for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Subhojyoti Mukherjee , Anusha Lalitha , Kousha Kalantari , Aniket Deshmukh , Ge Liu , Yifei Ma , Branislav Kveton

Re-inforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has been effective in the task of AI alignment. However, one of the key assumptions of RLHF is that the annotators (referred to as workers from here on out) have a homogeneous response…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Sarvesh Shashidhar , Abhishek Mishra , Madhav Kotecha

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

This paper investigates image inpainting with preference alignment. Instead of introducing a novel method, we go back to basics and revisit fundamental problems in achieving such alignment. We leverage the prominent direct preference…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Yutao Shen , Junkun Yuan , Toru Aonishi , Hideki Nakayama , Yue Ma

Targeting and personalization policies can be used to improve outcomes beyond the uniform policy that assigns the best performing treatment in an A/B test to everyone. Personalization relies on the presence of heterogeneity of treatment…

Applications · Statistics 2025-12-12 Anya Shchetkina

To better align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human judgment, Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) learns a reward model and then optimizes it using regularized RL. Recently, direct alignment methods were introduced to…

Preference-based feedback is important for many applications in machine learning where evaluation of a reward function is not feasible. Notable recent examples arise in preference alignment for large language models, including in…

We study the problem of aligning a generative model's response with a user's preferences. Recent works have proposed several different formulations for personalized alignment; however, they either require a large amount of user preference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-06 Victor-Alexandru Pădurean , Parameswaran Kamalaruban , Nachiket Kotalwar , Alkis Gotovos , Adish Singla

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

Preference alignment methods are increasingly critical for steering large language models (LLMs) to generate outputs consistent with human values. While recent approaches often rely on synthetic data generated by LLMs for scalability and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Mingye Zhu , Yi Liu , Zheren Fu , Yongdong Zhang , Zhendong Mao

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

Reward design in reinforcement learning and optimal control is challenging. Preference-based alignment addresses this by enabling agents to learn rewards from ranked trajectory pairs provided by humans. However, existing methods often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Zhixian Xie , Haode Zhang , Yizhe Feng , Wanxin Jin

Large language models (LLMs) alignment aims to ensure that the behavior of LLMs meets human preferences. While collecting data from multiple fine-grained, aspect-specific preferences becomes more and more feasible, existing alignment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Jia Zhang , Yao Liu , Chen-Xi Zhang , Yi Liu , Yi-Xuan Jin , Lan-Zhe Guo , Yu-Feng Li

Preference learning is critical for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values, with the quality of preference datasets playing a crucial role in this process. While existing metrics primarily assess data quality based on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Kexin Huang , Junkang Wu , Ziqian Chen , Xue Wang , Jinyang Gao , Bolin Ding , Jiancan Wu , Xiangnan He , Xiang Wang

The recent success in using human preferences to align large language models (LLMs) has significantly improved their performance in various downstream tasks, such as question answering, mathematical reasoning, and code generation. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Xiaoqiang Lin , Arun Verma , Zhongxiang Dai , Daniela Rus , See-Kiong Ng , Bryan Kian Hsiang Low

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences is crucial for safe deployment, yet existing methods assume specific preference models like Bradley-Terry model. This assumption leads to statistical inconsistency, where more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Rei Higuchi , Taiji Suzuki

AI alignment, the challenge of ensuring AI systems act in accordance with human values, has emerged as a critical problem in the development of systems such as foundation models and recommender systems. Still, the current dominant approach,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-14 Benjamin Heymann

Preference based alignment objectives implicitly assume that all human preferences are expressed with equal strength. In practice, however, preference strength varies across individuals and contexts -- a phenomenon established in behavioral…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Saki Imai , Pedram Heydari , Anthony Sicilia , Asteria Kaeberlein , Katherine Atwell , Malihe Alikhani

The success of AI assistants based on language models (LLMs) hinges crucially on Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), which enables the generation of responses more aligned with human preferences. As universal AI assistants,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-27 Rui Zheng , Wei Shen , Yuan Hua , Wenbin Lai , Shihan Dou , Yuhao Zhou , Zhiheng Xi , Xiao Wang , Haoran Huang , Tao Gui , Qi Zhang , Xuanjing Huang

Aligning large language models with human preferences is critical for creating reliable and controllable AI systems. A human preference can be visualized as a high-dimensional vector where different directions represent trade-offs between…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Ruochen Mao , Yuling Shi , Xiaodong Gu , Jiaheng Wei