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Post-training alignment of large language models (LLMs) is a critical challenge, as not all tokens contribute equally to model performance. This paper introduces a selective alignment strategy that prioritizes high-impact tokens within…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-11 Zhijin Dong

On-policy distillation (OPD) has become a promising paradigm for reasoning-oriented post-training of large language models (LLMs), especially when combined with reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR). Existing OPD methods…

Knowledge distillation (KD) is an effective model compression method that can transfer the internal capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to smaller ones. However, the multi-modal probability distribution predicted by teacher LLMs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-19 Tianyu Peng , Jiajun Zhang

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

Adapting large language models (LLMs) to long-context tasks requires post-training methods that remain accurate and coherent over thousands of tokens. Existing approaches are limited in several ways: 1) off-policy methods such as supervised…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Miguel Moura Ramos , Duarte M. Alves , André F. T. Martins

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) aligns Large Language Models with human preferences without the need for a separate reward model. However, DPO treats all tokens in responses equally, neglecting the differing importance of individual…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Chengyu Huang , Zhuohang Li , Sheng-Yen Chou , Claire Cardie

The increasing capabilities of large language models (LLMs) raise opportunities for artificial general intelligence but concurrently amplify safety concerns, such as potential misuse of AI systems, necessitating effective AI alignment.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-29 Chaoqi Wang , Yibo Jiang , Chenghao Yang , Han Liu , Yuxin Chen

Reinforcement Learning From Human Feedback (RLHF) has been critical to the success of the latest generation of generative AI models. In response to the complex nature of the classical RLHF pipeline, direct alignment algorithms such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-14 Rafael Rafailov , Joey Hejna , Ryan Park , Chelsea Finn

We introduce a low-resource safety enhancement method for aligning large language models (LLMs) without the need for supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Our main idea is to exploit knowledge…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Haozheng Luo , Jiahao Yu , Wenxin Zhang , Jialong Li , Jerry Yao-Chieh Hu , Xinyu Xing , Han Liu

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

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), using algorithms like Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), aligns Large Language Models (LLMs) with human values but is costly and unstable. Alternatives have been proposed to replace PPO or…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Liang Zhu , Feiteng Fang , Yuelin Bai , Longze Chen , Zhexiang Zhang , Minghuan Tan , Min Yang

On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) is an emerging LLM post-training paradigm in which the model serves as its own teacher: conditioned on privileged information such as a reference trace or hint, the same policy provides dense token-level…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Hongbin Zhang , Chaozheng Wang , Kehai Chen , Youcheng Pan , Yang Xiang , Jinpeng Wang , Min Zhang

In the field of large language models (LLMs), Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a critical technique for transferring capabilities from teacher models to student models. However, existing KD methods face limitations and challenges in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Yixing Li , Yuxian Gu , Li Dong , Dequan Wang , Yu Cheng , Furu Wei

Inference-time alignment provides an efficient alternative for aligning LLMs with humans. However, these approaches still face challenges, such as limited scalability due to policy-specific value functions and latency during the inference…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Ruizhe Chen , Wenhao Chai , Zhifei Yang , Xiaotian Zhang , Joey Tianyi Zhou , Tony Quek , Soujanya Poria , Zuozhu Liu

Recent advances in few-step diffusion distillation have enabled efficient image generation, yet aligning these models with human preferences remains challenging. We propose Reward-Tilted Distribution Matching Distillation (RTDMD), a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Yushi Huang , Xiangxin Zhou , Ruoyu Wang , Chi Zhang , Jun Zhang , Tianyu Pang

Distilling large language models (LLMs) typically involves transferring the teacher model's responses through supervised fine-tuning (SFT). However, this approach neglects the potential to distill both data (output content) and reward…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Yudi Zhang , Lu Wang , Meng Fang , Yali Du , Chenghua Huang , Jun Wang , Qingwei Lin , Mykola Pechenizkiy , Dongmei Zhang , Saravan Rajmohan , Qi Zhang

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

Aligning large language models (LLMs) to human preferences is a crucial step in building helpful and safe AI tools, which usually involve training on supervised datasets. Popular algorithms such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) rely…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Honggen Zhang , Xufeng Zhao , Igor Molybog , June Zhang

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

Large language models (LLMs) are fine-tuned using human comparison data with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) methods to make them better aligned with users' preferences. In contrast to LLMs, human preference learning has…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-11-23 Bram Wallace , Meihua Dang , Rafael Rafailov , Linqi Zhou , Aaron Lou , Senthil Purushwalkam , Stefano Ermon , Caiming Xiong , Shafiq Joty , Nikhil Naik