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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

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

DPO (Direct Preference Optimization) has become a widely used offline preference optimization algorithm due to its simplicity and training stability. However, DPO is prone to overfitting and collapse. To address these challenges, we propose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Rui Wang , Qianguo Sun , Chao Song , Junlong Wu , Tianrong Chen , Zhiyun Zeng , Yu Li

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is an effective framework for aligning large language models with human preferences, but it struggles with complex reasoning tasks. DPO optimizes for the likelihood of generating preferred over…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Darsh Kachroo , Adriana Caraeni , Arjun Prasaath Anbazhagan , Brennan Lagasse , Kevin Zhu

Enhancing the conformity of large language models (LLMs) to human preferences remains an ongoing research challenge. Recently, offline approaches such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) have gained prominence as attractive options due…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-05 Kaihui Chen , Hao Yi , Qingyang Li , Tianyu Qi , Yulan Hu , Fuzheng Zhang , Yong Liu

Large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential in natural language processing tasks, but their application to machine translation (MT) remains challenging due to pretraining on English-centric data and the complexity of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-24 Guofeng Cui , Pichao Wang , Yang Liu , Zemian Ke , Zhu Liu , Vimal Bhat

Test-time scaling has proven effective in further enhancing the performance of pretrained Large Language Models (LLMs). However, mainstream post-training methods (i.e., reinforcement learning (RL) with chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Yuyang Xu , Yi Cheng , Haochao Ying , Zhuoyun Du , Renjun Hu , Xing Shi , Wei Lin , Jian Wu

Preference finetuning methods like Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) with AI-generated feedback have shown promise in aligning Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) with human preferences. However, existing techniques overlook the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Rohan Wadhawan , Fabrice Y Harel-Canada , Zi-Yi Dou , Suhaila Shakiah , Robinson Piramuthu , Nanyun Peng

A common technique for aligning large language models (LLMs) relies on acquiring human preferences by comparing multiple generations conditioned on a fixed context. This method, however, relies solely on pairwise comparisons, where the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-09 Hritik Bansal , Ashima Suvarna , Gantavya Bhatt , Nanyun Peng , Kai-Wei Chang , Aditya Grover

Direct preference optimization (DPO) has shown success in aligning diffusion models with human preference. Previous approaches typically assume a consistent preference label between final generations and noisy samples at intermediate steps,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-05 Jie Ren , Yuhang Zhang , Dongrui Liu , Xiaopeng Zhang , Qi Tian

We study the post-training of large language models (LLMs) with human preference data. Recently, direct preference optimization and its variants have shown considerable promise in aligning language models, eliminating the need for reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Teng Xiao , Zhen Ge , Sujay Sanghavi , Tian Wang , Julian Katz-Samuels , Marc Versage , Qingjun Cui , Trishul Chilimbi

Using effective generalization capabilities of vision language models (VLMs) in context-specific dynamic tasks for embodied artificial intelligence remains a significant challenge. Although supervised fine-tuned models can better align with…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-11 Kechen Jiao , Zhirui Fang , Jiahao Liu , Bei Li , Qifan Wang , Xinyu Liu , Junhao Ruan , Zhongjian Qiao , Yifan Zhu , Yaxin Xu , Jingang Wang , Xiu Li

Post-training paradigms for Large Language Models (LLMs), primarily Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL), face a fundamental dilemma: SFT provides stability (low variance) but suffers from high fitting bias, while RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Taojie Zhu , Dongyang Xu , Ding Zou , Sen Zhao , Qiaobo Hao , Zhiguo Yang , Yonghong He

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

With the rapid development and widespread application of Large Language Models (LLMs), their potential safety risks have attracted widespread attention. Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has been adopted to enhance the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Shiji Zhao , Mengyang Wang , Shukun Xiong , Fangzhou Chen , Qihui Zhu , Shouwei Ruan , Yisong Xiao , Ranjie Duan , Xun Chen , XingXing Wei

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…

Mathematical reasoning is a fundamental capability for large language models (LLMs), yet achieving high performance in this domain remains a significant challenge. The auto-regressive generation process often makes LLMs susceptible to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Xiaoxuan Lou , Chaojie Wang , Bo An

Latent reasoning offers a more efficient alternative to explicit reasoning by compressing intermediate reasoning into continuous representations and substantially shortening reasoning chains. However, existing latent reasoning methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Jingcheng Deng , Zihao Wei , Liang Pang , Junhong Wu , Shicheng Xu , Zenghao Duan , Huawei Shen

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 model (LLM) alignment via reinforcement learning from human preferences (RLHF) suffers from unstable policy updates, ambiguous gradient directions, poor interpretability, and high gradient variance in mainstream pairwise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Hao Yu