English
Related papers

Related papers: Preference is More Than Comparisons: Rethinking Du…

200 papers

Aligning language models with human preferences through reinforcement learning from human feedback is crucial for their safe and effective deployment. The human preference is typically represented through comparison where one response is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Hoang Anh Just , Ming Jin , Anit Sahu , Huy Phan , Ruoxi Jia

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

Bandit algorithms are guaranteed to solve diverse sequential decision-making problems, provided that a sufficient exploration budget is available. However, learning from scratch is often too costly for personalization tasks where a single…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-08 Newton Mwai , Emil Carlsson , Fredrik D. Johansson

The contextual duelling bandit problem models adaptive recommender systems, where the algorithm presents a set of items to the user, and the user's choice reveals their preference. This setup is well suited for implicit choices users make…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-27 Suryanarayana Sankagiri , Jalal Etesami , Pouria Fatemi , Matthias Grossglauser

We consider the problem of contextual bandits and imitation learning, where the learner lacks direct knowledge of the executed action's reward. Instead, the learner can actively query an expert at each round to compare two actions and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-25 Ayush Sekhari , Karthik Sridharan , Wen Sun , Runzhe Wu

The objective of canonical multi-armed bandits is to identify and repeatedly select an arm with the largest reward, often in the form of the expected value of the arm's probability distribution. Such a utilitarian perspective and focus on…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-01 Meltem Tatlı , Arpan Mukherjee , Prashanth L. A. , Karthikeyan Shanmugam , Ali Tajer

The design of personalized incentives or recommendations to improve user engagement is gaining prominence as digital platform providers continually emerge. We propose a multi-armed bandit framework for matching incentives to users, whose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-09 Tanner Fiez , Shreyas Sekar , Liyuan Zheng , Lillian J. Ratliff

While astonishingly capable, large Language Models (LLM) can sometimes produce outputs that deviate from human expectations. Such deviations necessitate an alignment phase to prevent disseminating untruthful, toxic, or biased information.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-30 Long Tan Le , Han Shu , Tung-Anh Nguyen , Choong Seon Hong , Nguyen H. Tran

Recommender systems trained in a continuous learning fashion are plagued by the feedback loop problem, also known as algorithmic bias. This causes a newly trained model to act greedily and favor items that have already been engaged by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-04 Dalin Guo , Sofia Ira Ktena , Ferenc Huszar , Pranay Kumar Myana , Wenzhe Shi , Alykhan Tejani

Preference alignment in Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly improved their ability to adhere to human instructions and intentions. However, existing direct alignment algorithms primarily focus on relative preferences and often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Shenao Zhang , Zhihan Liu , Boyi Liu , Yufeng Zhang , Yingxiang Yang , Yongfei Liu , Liyu Chen , Tao Sun , Zhaoran Wang

Reinforcement learning from human feedback usually models preferences using a reward function that does not distinguish between people. We argue that this is unlikely to be a good design choice in contexts with high potential for…

Bayesian optimization (BO) has emerged during the last few years as an effective approach to optimizing black-box functions where direct queries of the objective are expensive. In this paper we consider the case where direct access to the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-04-13 Javier Gonzalez , Zhenwen Dai , Andreas Damianou , Neil D. Lawrence

We study the problem of $K$-armed dueling bandit for both stochastic and adversarial environments, where the goal of the learner is to aggregate information through relative preferences of pair of decisions points queried in an online…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Aadirupa Saha , Pierre Gaillard

Large foundation models pretrained on raw web-scale data are not readily deployable without additional step of extensive alignment to human preferences. Such alignment is typically done by collecting large amounts of pairwise comparisons…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-13 Daiwei Chen , Yi Chen , Aniket Rege , Ramya Korlakai Vinayak

When AI tools can generate many solutions, some human preference must be applied to determine which solution is relevant to the current project. One way to find those preferences is interactive search-based software engineering (iSBSE)…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-01-18 Andre Lustosa , Tim Menzies

Conversational recommender systems proactively query users with relevant "key terms" and leverage the feedback to elicit users' preferences for personalized recommendations. Conversational contextual bandits, a prevalent approach in this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Maoli Liu , Zhuohua Li , Xiangxiang Dai , John C. S. Lui

Reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF), which learns a reward model from human preference data and then optimizes a policy to favor preferred responses, has emerged as a central paradigm for aligning large language models (LLMs)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-29 Gen Li , Yuling Yan

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences is a critical challenge in AI research. While methods like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) are widely used, they often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Xuan Qi , Rongwu Xu , Zhijing Jin

In this work, we study sequential choice bandits with feedback. We propose bandit algorithms for a platform that personalizes users' experience to maximize its rewards. For each action directed to a given user, the platform is given a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-01-06 Anshuka Rangi , Massimo Franceschetti , Long Tran-Thanh

Preference optimization is a critical post-training technique used to align large language models (LLMs) with human preferences, typically by fine-tuning on ranked response pairs. While methods like Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) have…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Rhitabrat Pokharel , Yufei Tao , Ameeta Agrawal