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Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a popular alternative to Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), offering theoretical equivalence with simpler implementation. We prove this equivalence is conditional rather…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Zhiqin Yang , Yonggang Zhang , Wei Xue , Dong Fang , Bo Han , Yike Guo

Aligning large language models (LLM) with human preference plays a key role in building modern generative models and can be achieved by reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Despite their superior performance, current RLHF…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-12 Kaixuan Ji , Jiafan He , Quanquan Gu

The alignment of large language models (LLMs) with human preferences is commonly achieved through Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) simplified this paradigm by establishing a direct…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Yuandong Tan

Alignment of large language models (LLMs) with human values has recently garnered significant attention, with prominent examples including the canonical yet costly Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and the simple Direct…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Xufei Lv , Kehai Chen , Haoyuan Sun , Xuefeng Bai , Min Zhang , Houde Liu , Kehai Chen

Preference learning is a key technology for aligning language models with human values. Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a model-based algorithm to optimize preference learning, which first fits a reward model for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-26 Zaifan Jiang , Xing Huang , Chao Wei

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and derivative techniques like Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) are task-alignment algorithms used to repurpose general, foundational models for specific tasks. We show that applying…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Kaden Uhlig , Joern Wuebker , Raphael Reinauer , John DeNero

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) to human preferences in content, style, and presentation is challenging, in part because preferences are varied, context-dependent, and sometimes inherently ambiguous. While successful, Reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Sam Houliston , Alizée Pace , Alexander Immer , Gunnar Rätsch

In the classical Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) framework, Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is employed to learn from sparse, sentence-level rewards -- a challenging scenario in traditional deep reinforcement learning.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Han Zhong , Zikang Shan , Guhao Feng , Wei Xiong , Xinle Cheng , Li Zhao , Di He , Jiang Bian , Liwei Wang

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has evolved to be one of the main methods for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs). However, existing RLHF methods are non-robust, and their performance deteriorates if the downstream…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Debmalya Mandal , Paulius Sasnauskas , Goran Radanovic

Direct preference optimization (DPO) is a form of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) where the policy is learned directly from preferential feedback. Although many models of human preferences exist, the critical task of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Branislav Kveton , Xintong Li , Julian McAuley , Ryan Rossi , Jingbo Shang , Junda Wu , Tong Yu

With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), aligning policy models with human preferences has become increasingly critical. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a promising approach for alignment, acting as an…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Wenyi Xiao , Zechuan Wang , Leilei Gan , Shuai Zhao , Zongrui Li , Ruirui Lei , Wanggui He , Luu Anh Tuan , Long Chen , Hao Jiang , Zhou Zhao , Fei Wu

We present a fine-grained theoretical analysis of the performance gap between two-stage reinforcement learning from human feedback~(RLHF) and direct preference optimization~(DPO). Our study decomposes this gap into two sources: the explicit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Ruizhe Shi , Minhak Song , Runlong Zhou , Zihan Zhang , Maryam Fazel , Simon S. Du

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has become central to aligning large language models with human values, typically by first learning a reward model from preference data which is then used to update the model with…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Keertana Chidambaram , Karthik Vinary Seetharaman , Vasilis Syrgkanis

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has become central to aligning large language models with human values, typically by first learning a reward model from preference data which is then used to update the model with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Keertana Chidambaram , Karthik Vinay Seetharaman , Vasilis Syrgkanis

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a pivotal technique for large language model (LLM) alignment. This paper studies the setting of online RLHF and focus on improving sample efficiency. All existing algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Mingyu Chen , Yiding Chen , Wen Sun , Xuezhou Zhang

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is widely utilized in the Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) phase to align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences, thereby enhancing both their harmlessness and efficacy.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Wei Liu , Yang Bai , Chengcheng Han , Rongxiang Weng , Jun Xu , Xuezhi Cao , Jingang Wang , Xunliang Cai

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a pivotal tool for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), one of the most popular approaches, formulates RLHF as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Jiafan He , Huizhuo Yuan , Quanquan Gu

Aligning generative models with human preference via RLHF typically suffers from overoptimization, where an imperfectly learned reward model can misguide the generative model to output undesired responses. We investigate this problem in a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-05 Zhihan Liu , Miao Lu , Shenao Zhang , Boyi Liu , Hongyi Guo , Yingxiang Yang , Jose Blanchet , Zhaoran Wang

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is an effective approach for aligning language models to human preferences. Central to RLHF is learning a reward function for scoring human preferences. Two main approaches for learning a…

Language model alignment methods such as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) have led to impressive advances in language model capabilities, but are limited by a widely observed phenomenon known as overoptimization, where the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Audrey Huang , Wenhao Zhan , Tengyang Xie , Jason D. Lee , Wen Sun , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Dylan J. Foster