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Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences is crucial, but standard methods like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) are often complex and unstable. In this work, we propose a new, simpler approach that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Saeed Najafi , Alona Fyshe

Personalized alignment from preference data has focused primarily on improving personal reward model (RM) accuracy, with the implicit assumption that better preference ranking translates to better personalized behavior. However, in…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Fady Rezk , Yuangang Pan , Chuan-Sheng Foo , Xun Xu , Nancy Chen , Henry Gouk , Timothy Hospedales

Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit tendencies that diverge from human preferences, such as favoring certain writing styles or producing overly verbose outputs. While crucial for improvement, identifying the factors driving these…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Juhyun Oh , Eunsu Kim , Jiseon Kim , Wenda Xu , Inha Cha , William Yang Wang , Alice Oh

Reward design plays a pivotal role in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values, serving as the bridge between feedback signals and model optimization. This survey provides a structured organization of reward modeling and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Miaomiao Ji , Yanqiu Wu , Zhibin Wu , Shoujin Wang , Jian Yang , Mark Dras , Usman Naseem

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

Reward models (RMs) are central to aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values but have received less attention than pretrained and post-trained LLMs themselves. Because RMs are initialized from LLMs, they inherit…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as automatic evaluators in applications such as benchmarking, reward modeling, and self-refinement. Prior work highlights a potential self-preference bias where LLMs favor their own…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Wei-Lin Chen , Zhepei Wei , Xinyu Zhu , Shi Feng , Yu Meng

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across diverse natural language processing tasks, aligning these models with varying human preferences across multiple objectives remains a significant challenge…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-17 Biao Liu , Ning Xu , Junming Yang , Xin Geng

Reward models (RMs) play a pivotal role in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values. However, noisy preferences in human feedback can lead to reward misgeneralization - a phenomenon where reward models learn spurious…

Direct alignment algorithms (DAAs), such as direct preference optimization (DPO), have become popular alternatives for Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) due to their simplicity, efficiency, and stability. However, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Jongwoo Ko , Saket Dingliwal , Bhavana Ganesh , Sailik Sengupta , Sravan Bodapati , Aram Galstyan

Preference optimization, particularly through Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), has achieved significant success in aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) to adhere to human intentions. Unlike offline alignment with a fixed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-06 Shenao Zhang , Donghan Yu , Hiteshi Sharma , Han Zhong , Zhihan Liu , Ziyi Yang , Shuohang Wang , Hany Hassan , Zhaoran Wang

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

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in handling complex dialogue tasks without requiring use case-specific fine-tuning. However, analyzing live dialogues in real-time necessitates low-latency processing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-10 Xuanqing Liu , Luyang Kong , Wei Niu , Afshin Khashei , Belinda Zeng , Steve Johnson , Jon Jay , Davor Golac , Matt Pope

Alignment, endowing a pre-trained Large language model (LLM) with the ability to follow instructions, is crucial for its real-world applications. Conventional supervised fine-tuning (SFT) methods formalize it as causal language modeling…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-18 Yuchen Fan , Yuzhong Hong , Qiushi Wang , Junwei Bao , Hongfei Jiang , Yang Song

Recent work in large language modeling (LLMs) has used fine-tuning to align outputs with the preferences of a prototypical user. This work assumes that human preferences are static and homogeneous across individuals, so that aligning to a a…

Recent research has attempted to associate preference optimization (PO) performance with the underlying preference datasets. In this work, our observation is that the differences between the preferred response $y^+$ and dispreferred…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Chengyu Huang , Tanya Goyal

The reward model (RM) that represents human preferences plays a crucial role in optimizing the outputs of large language models (LLMs), e.g., through reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) or rejection sampling. However, a long…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Yizhou Chen , Yawen Liu , Xuesi Wang , Qingtao Yu , Guangda Huzhang , Anxiang Zeng , Han Yu , Zhiming Zhou

Reinforcement learning (RL) faces challenges in evaluating policy trajectories within intricate game tasks due to the difficulty in designing comprehensive and precise reward functions. This inherent difficulty curtails the broader…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Zichao Shen , Tianchen Zhu , Qingyun Sun , Shiqi Gao , Jianxin Li

Self-play preference optimization has emerged as a prominent paradigm for aligning large language models (LLMs). It typically involves a language model to generate on-policy responses for prompts and a reward model (RM) to guide the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Yao Xiao , Jung-jae Kim , Roy Ka-wei Lee , Lidong Bing

Human preference alignment is critical in building powerful and reliable large language models (LLMs). However, current methods either ignore the multi-dimensionality of human preferences (e.g. helpfulness and harmlessness) or struggle with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-14 Xingzhou Lou , Junge Zhang , Jian Xie , Lifeng Liu , Dong Yan , Kaiqi Huang