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Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), the efficient alternative to PPO-based RLHF, falls short on knowledge-intensive generation: standard preference signals from human annotators or LLM judges exhibit a systematic verbosity bias that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Qiming Bao , Juho Leinonen , Paul Denny , Michael J. Witbrock

Although LLMs have achieved significant success, their reliance on large volumes of human-annotated data has limited their potential for further scaling. In this situation, utilizing self-generated synthetic data has become crucial for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Haoyan Yang , Khiem Le , Ting Hua , Shangqian Gao , Binfeng Xu , Zheng Tang , Jie Xu , Nitesh V. Chawla , Hongxia Jin , Vijay Srinivasan

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has become a popular method for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) due to its stability and simplicity. However, it is also known to be sensitive to noise in the data and prone to overfitting.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Cheol Woo Kim , Shresth Verma , Mauricio Tec , Milind Tambe

Direct alignment from preferences (DAP) has emerged as a promising paradigm for aligning large language models (LLMs) to human desiderata from pre-collected, offline preference datasets. While recent studies indicate that existing offline…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Wenda Xu , Jiachen Li , William Yang Wang , Lei Li

The alignment of large language models (LLMs) often assumes that using more clean data yields better outcomes, overlooking the match between model capacity and example difficulty. Challenging this, we propose a new principle: Preference…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-15 Chengqian Gao , Haonan Li , Liu Liu , Zeke Xie , Peilin Zhao , Zhiqiang Xu

Machine unlearning has gained increasing attention in recent years, as a promising technique to selectively remove unwanted privacy or copyrighted information from Large Language Models that are trained on a massive scale of human data.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Junyi Li , Yongqiang Chen , Ningning Ding

Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently proven effective at scaling chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning in large language models for tasks with verifiable answers. However, extending RL-based thought training to more general non-verifiable…

Existing reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training methods for large language models have advanced rapidly, yet their design has largely been guided by heuristics rather than systematic theoretical principles. This gap limits our…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-16 Zixun Huang , Jiayi Sheng , Zeyu Zheng

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across various domains, motivating researchers to investigate their potential use in recommendation systems. However, directly applying LLMs to recommendation tasks has…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Zhuoxi Bai , Ning Wu , Fengyu Cai , Xinyi Zhu , Yun Xiong

Despite their sophisticated general-purpose capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) often fail to align with diverse individual preferences because standard post-training methods, like Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF),…

Software engineering presents complex, multi-step challenges for Large Language Models (LLMs), requiring reasoning over large codebases and coordinated tool use. The difficulty of these tasks is exemplified by benchmarks like SWE-bench,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Jiahao Yu , Zelei Cheng , Xian Wu , Xinyu Xing

The dominant framework for alignment of large language models (LLM), whether through reinforcement learning from human feedback or direct preference optimisation, is to learn from preference data. This involves building datasets where each…

We study an LLM fine-tuning task for designing reward functions for sequential resource allocation problems in public health, guided by human preferences expressed in natural language. This setting presents a challenging testbed for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Cheol Woo Kim , Shresth Verma , Mauricio Tec , Milind Tambe

This thesis develops theoretical frameworks and algorithms that advance constrained reinforcement learning (RL) across control, preference learning, and alignment of large language models. The first contribution addresses constrained Markov…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Akhil Agnihotri

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has been proposed as a promising alternative to Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) based Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF). However, empirical evaluations consistently reveal suboptimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Qinwei Ma , Jingzhe Shi , Can Jin , Jenq-Neng Hwang , Serge Belongie , Lei Li

Aligning language models (LMs) with curated human feedback is critical to control their behaviors in real-world applications. Several recent policy optimization methods, such as DPO and SLiC, serve as promising alternatives to the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-28 Tianqi Liu , Zhen Qin , Junru Wu , Jiaming Shen , Misha Khalman , Rishabh Joshi , Yao Zhao , Mohammad Saleh , Simon Baumgartner , Jialu Liu , Peter J. Liu , Xuanhui Wang

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

Preference-based alignment objectives have been widely adopted, from RLHF-style pairwise learning in large language models to emerging applications in recommender systems. Yet, existing work rarely examines how Direct Preference…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Hejin Huang , Jusheng Zhang , Kaitong Cai , Jian Wang , Rong Pan

Existing multi-objective preference alignment methods for large language models (LLMs) face limitations: (1) the inability to effectively balance various preference dimensions, and (2) reliance on auxiliary reward/reference models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Qi Liu , Jingqing Ruan , Hao Li , Haodong Zhao , Desheng Wang , Jiansong Chen , Wan Guanglu , Xunliang Cai , Zhi Zheng , Tong Xu

We reveal a critical yet underexplored flaw in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs): even when these models know the correct answer, they frequently arrive there through incorrect reasoning paths. The core issue is not a lack of knowledge,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Chaoyang Wang , Yangfan He , Yiyang Zhou , Yixuan Wang , Jiaqi Liu , Peng Xia , Zhengzhong Tu , Mohit Bansal , Huaxiu Yao