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Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) have emerged as a popular method for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences. While DPO effectively preserves the relative ordering between chosen and rejected responses through…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Lin Sun , Chuang Liu , Peng Liu , Bingyang Li , Weijia Lu , Ning Wu

The class of direct preference optimization (DPO) algorithms has emerged as a promising approach for solving the alignment problem in foundation models. These algorithms work with very limited feedback in the form of pairwise preferences…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Luca Viano , Ruida Zhou , Yifan Sun , Mahdi Namazifar , Volkan Cevher , Shoham Sabach , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has become central to aligning large language models with human values, typically by first learning a reward model from preference data which is then used to update the model with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Keertana Chidambaram , Karthik Vinay Seetharaman , Vasilis Syrgkanis

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has been proposed as an effective and efficient alternative to reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). However, neither RLHF nor DPO take into account the fact that learning certain…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Florinel-Alin Croitoru , Vlad Hondru , Radu Tudor Ionescu , Nicu Sebe , Mubarak Shah

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) simplifies reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) for large language models (LLMs) by directly optimizing human preferences without an explicit reward model. We find that during DPO training,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Junshu Pan , Wei Shen , Shulin Huang , Qiji Zhou , Yue Zhang

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has become central to aligning large language models with human values, typically by first learning a reward model from preference data which is then used to update the model with…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Keertana Chidambaram , Karthik Vinary Seetharaman , Vasilis Syrgkanis

Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) enhances the alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, its limitations have led to the development of Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), an RL-free approach designed to overcome…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Amir Saeidi , Shivanshu Verma , Aswin RRV , Kashif Rasul , Chitta Baral

We present a fine-grained theoretical analysis of the performance gap between two-stage reinforcement learning from human feedback~(RLHF) and direct preference optimization~(DPO). Our study decomposes this gap into two sources: the explicit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Ruizhe Shi , Minhak Song , Runlong Zhou , Zihan Zhang , Maryam Fazel , Simon S. Du

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…

Efficiently aligning large-scale video diffusion models with human intent requires a scalable and trajectory-aware pathway that bridges the inherent discrepancy between training noise distributions and practical inference trajectories.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Jingyuan Zhu , Biaolong Chen , Le Zhang , Aixi Zhang , Hao Jiang , Pipei Huang

While large-scale unsupervised language models (LMs) learn broad world knowledge and some reasoning skills, achieving precise control of their behavior is difficult due to the completely unsupervised nature of their training. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-31 Rafael Rafailov , Archit Sharma , Eric Mitchell , Stefano Ermon , Christopher D. Manning , Chelsea Finn

In this paper, we take a step towards a deeper understanding of learning from human preferences by systematically comparing the paradigm of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) with the recently proposed paradigm of direct…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Andi Nika , Debmalya Mandal , Parameswaran Kamalaruban , Georgios Tzannetos , Goran Radanović , Adish Singla

In the field of large language models (LLMs), aligning models with the diverse preferences of users is a critical challenge. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has played a key role in this area. It works by using pairs of preferences…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-29 Yueqin Yin , Zhendong Wang , Yi Gu , Hai Huang , Weizhu Chen , Mingyuan Zhou

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

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences has gained significant attention, with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) as a standard yet computationally expensive method and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) as a more…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Yuzi Yan , Yibo Miao , Jialian Li , Yipin Zhang , Jian Xie , Zhijie Deng , Dong Yan

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and its variants have become the de facto standards for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences or specific goals. However, DPO requires high-quality preference data and suffers from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Zhuotong Chen , Fang Liu , Jennifer Zhu , Wanyu Du , Yanjun Qi

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) plays a crucial role in aligning language models with human preferences. While the significance of dataset quality is generally recognized, explicit investigations into its impact within the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-04 Tetsuro Morimura , Mitsuki Sakamoto , Yuu Jinnai , Kenshi Abe , Kaito Ariu

Recently, there has been significant interest in replacing the reward model in Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) methods for Large Language Models (LLMs), such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and its variants. These…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-27 Jian Li , Haojing Huang , Yujia Zhang , Pengfei Xu , Xi Chen , Rui Song , Lida Shi , Jingwen Wang , Hao Xu

Preference-based reinforcement learning (RL) is a key paradigm for aligning policies with human judgments, yet its theoretical behavior in distributed settings where preference data are fragmented across heterogeneous users remains poorly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Zhanhong Jiang

DPO is an effective preference optimization algorithm. However, the DPO-tuned models tend to overfit on the dispreferred samples, manifested as overly long generations lacking diversity. While recent regularization approaches have…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Chenxu Yang , Ruipeng Jia , Naibin Gu , Zheng Lin , Siyuan Chen , Chao Pang , Weichong Yin , Yu Sun , Hua Wu , Weiping Wang