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Related papers: Pairwise Calibrated Rewards for Pluralistic Alignm…

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Popularity bias is a well-known phenomenon in recommender systems: popular items are recommended even more frequently than their popularity would warrant, amplifying long-tail effects already present in many recommendation domains. Prior…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2020-07-27 Himan Abdollahpouri , Masoud Mansoury , Robin Burke , Bamshad Mobasher

Pluralistic alignment requires systems to adapt to diverse user values, communication styles, and contextual assumptions. We believe that a foundational prerequisite for such alignment enabling accurate preference elicitation from people…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Jinyan Su , Jennifer Healey

Alignment via reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has become the dominant paradigm for controlling the quality of outputs from large language models (LLMs). However, existing theories do not provide strong justification for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Jihun Yun , Juno Kim , Jongho Park , Junhyuck Kim , Jongha Jon Ryu , Jaewoong Cho , Kwang-Sung Jun

Human preference evaluations are widely used to compare generative models, yet it remains unclear how many judgments are required to reliably detect small improvements. We show that when preference signal is diffuse across prompts (i.e.,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Wilson Y. Lee

Multi-objective preference alignment in language models often encounters a challenging trade-off: optimizing for one human preference (e.g., helpfulness) frequently compromises others (e.g., harmlessness) due to the inherent conflicts…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-16 Zhihao Xu , Yongqi Tong , Xin Zhang , Jun Zhou , Xiting Wang

Pairwise learning strategies are prevalent for optimizing recommendation models on implicit feedback data, which usually learns user preference by discriminating between positive (i.e., clicked by a user) and negative items (i.e., obtained…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-02-17 Xiao Chen , Wenqi Fan , Jingfan Chen , Haochen Liu , Zitao Liu , Zhaoxiang Zhang , Qing Li

Preference optimization has emerged as an efficient alternative to online reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) for aligning text-to-image diffusion models. However, existing methods largely reduce supervision to binary pairwise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Austin Wang , Jiaqi Han , Stefano Ermon , Yisong Yue

Recently, tremendous strides have been made to align the generation of Large Language Models (LLMs) with human values to mitigate toxic or unhelpful content. Leveraging Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) proves effective and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Mingye Zhu , Yi Liu , Lei Zhang , Junbo Guo , Zhendong Mao

Recommender systems utilize users' historical data to learn and predict their future interests, providing them with suggestions tailored to their tastes. Calibration ensures that the distribution of recommended item categories is consistent…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-08-23 Mohammadmehdi Naghiaei , Hossein A. Rahmani , Mohammad Aliannejadi , Nasim Sonboli

The field of preference optimization has made outstanding contributions to the alignment of language models with human preferences. Despite these advancements, recent methods still rely heavily on substantial paired (labeled) feedback data,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Seonggyun Lee , Sungjun Lim , Seojin Park , Soeun Cheon , Kyungwoo Song

Recommender systems are personalized: we expect the results given to a particular user to reflect that user's preferences. Some researchers have studied the notion of calibration, how well recommendations match users' stated preferences,…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2019-09-17 Kun Lin , Nasim Sonboli , Bamshad Mobasher , Robin Burke

In crowdsourced preference aggregation, it is often assumed that all the annotators are subject to a common preference or social utility function which generates their comparison behaviors in experiments. However, in reality annotators are…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2018-05-01 Qianqian Xu , Jiechao Xiong , Xiaochun Cao , Qingming Huang , Yuan Yao

Reward models (RMs) are essential for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences to improve interaction quality. However, the real world is pluralistic, which leads to diversified human preferences with respect to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-18 Pengyu Cheng , Jiawen Xie , Ke Bai , Yong Dai , Nan Du

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback has become the standard paradigm for language model alignment, where reward models directly determine alignment effectiveness. In this work, we focus on how to evaluate the generalizability of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Yangyang Zhou , Yi-Chen Li

Calibration is a frequently invoked concept when useful label probability estimates are required on top of classification accuracy. A calibrated model is a function whose values correctly reflect underlying label probabilities. Calibration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Alireza Torabian , Ruth Urner

Real-world recommender systems often need to balance multiple objectives when deciding which recommendations to present to users. These include behavioural signals (e.g. clicks, shares, dwell time), as well as broader objectives (e.g.…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-09-17 Olivier Jeunen , Jatin Mandav , Ivan Potapov , Nakul Agarwal , Sourabh Vaid , Wenzhe Shi , Aleksei Ustimenko

Multi-class classification methods that produce sets of probabilistic classifiers, such as ensemble learning methods, are able to model aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty. Aleatoric uncertainty is then typically quantified via the Bayes…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-04-20 Thomas Mortier , Viktor Bengs , Eyke Hüllermeier , Stijn Luca , Willem Waegeman

Learning human preferences in language models remains fundamentally challenging, as reward modeling relies on subtle, subjective comparisons or shades of gray rather than clear-cut labels. This study investigates the limits of current…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Simona-Vasilica Oprea , Adela Bâra

In classic reinforcement learning (RL) and decision making problems, policies are evaluated with respect to a scalar reward function, and all optimal policies are the same with regards to their expected return. However, many real-world…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-02 Han Shao , Lee Cohen , Avrim Blum , Yishay Mansour , Aadirupa Saha , Matthew R. Walter

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human intentions has become a critical task for safely deploying models in real-world systems. While existing alignment approaches have seen empirical success, theoretically understanding how these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-08 Shawn Im , Yixuan Li