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While Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) aligns Large Language Models (LLMs) with general, aggregate human preferences, it is suboptimal for learning diverse, individual perspectives. In this work, we study Reinforcement…

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) was introduced and used recently for promoting reasoning in LLMs under verifiable (binary) rewards. We show that the mean + variance calibration of these rewards induces a weighted contrastive loss…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Youssef Mroueh

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is broadly utilized for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human values because of its flexibility. Despite its effectiveness, it has been observed that the capability of DPO to generate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Wenqiao Zhu , Ji Liu , Lulu Wang , Jun Wu , Yulun Zhang

Post-training of LLMs with RLHF, and subsequently preference optimization algorithms such as DPO, IPO, etc., made a big difference in improving human alignment. However, all such techniques can only work with a single (human) objective. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-19 Akhil Agnihotri , Rahul Jain , Deepak Ramachandran , Zheng Wen

Reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) has become the dominant method to align large models to user preferences. Unlike fine-tuning, for which there are many studies regarding training data memorization, it is not clear how…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Aneesh Pappu , Billy Porter , Ilia Shumailov , Jamie Hayes

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has become the standard approach for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences, allowing LLMs to demonstrate remarkable abilities in various tasks. Existing methods work…

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) are promising alternatives to autoregressive large language models (AR-LLMs), as they potentially allow higher inference throughput. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a crucial component for dLLMs to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Yuchen Zhu , Wei Guo , Jaemoo Choi , Petr Molodyk , Bo Yuan , Molei Tao , Yongxin Chen

This paper studies post-training large language models (LLMs) using preference feedback from a powerful oracle to help a model iteratively improve over itself. The typical approach for post-training LLMs involves Reinforcement Learning from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-08 Corby Rosset , Ching-An Cheng , Arindam Mitra , Michael Santacroce , Ahmed Awadallah , Tengyang Xie

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 (RL) has become a cornerstone for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs), with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) serving as the de facto standard algorithm. Despite its ubiquity, we argue that the core ratio…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Penghui Qi , Xiangxin Zhou , Zichen Liu , Tianyu Pang , Chao Du , Min Lin , Wee Sun Lee

Learning from human preference data has emerged as the dominant paradigm for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs). The two most common families of techniques -- online reinforcement learning (RL) such as Proximal Policy Optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-17 Yuda Song , Gokul Swamy , Aarti Singh , J. Andrew Bagnell , Wen Sun

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) facilitates the alignment of large language models with human preferences, significantly enhancing the quality of interactions between humans and models. InstructGPT implements RLHF through…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Zheng Yuan , Hongyi Yuan , Chuanqi Tan , Wei Wang , Songfang Huang , Fei Huang

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has proven effectiveness for aligning text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models with human preferences. Although Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is widely adopted for its computational…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Jiamu Bai , Xin Yu , Meilong Xu , Weitao Lu , Xin Pan , Kiwan Maeng , Daniel Kifer , Jian Wang , Yu Wang

In large language model (LLM)-based recommendation systems, direct preference optimization (DPO) effectively aligns recommendations with user preferences, requiring multi-negative objective functions to leverage abundant implicit-feedback…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Xingyu Hu , Kai Zhang , Jiancan Wu , Shuli Wang , Chi Wang , Wenshuai Chen , Yinhua Zhu , Haitao Wang , Xingxing Wang , Xiang Wang

As the era of large language models (LLMs) unfolds, Preference Optimization (PO) methods have become a central approach to aligning LLMs with human preferences and improving performance. We propose Maximum a Posteriori Preference…

In this paper, we study offline Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) where we aim to learn the human's underlying reward and the MDP's optimal policy from a set of trajectories induced by human choices. RLHF is challenging for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-04 Zihao Li , Zhuoran Yang , Mengdi Wang

Large Language Models (LLMs) are often aligned using contrastive alignment objectives and preference pair datasets. The interaction between model, paired data, and objective makes alignment a complicated procedure, sometimes producing…

A major challenge in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences is the issue of distribution shift. LLM alignment algorithms rely on static preference datasets, assuming that they accurately represent real-world user…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Zaiyan Xu , Sushil Vemuri , Kishan Panaganti , Dileep Kalathil , Rahul Jain , Deepak Ramachandran

Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) is a widely used fine-tuning approach that aligns machine learning model, particularly Language Model (LM) with human preferences. There are typically multiple objectives driving the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Nuoya Xiong , Aarti Singh

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has proven effective in aligning large language models with human intentions, yet it often relies on complex methodologies like Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) that require extensive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-30 Han Xia , Songyang Gao , Qiming Ge , Zhiheng Xi , Qi Zhang , Xuanjing Huang