English
Related papers

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

200 papers

Offline preference alignment for language models such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is favored for its effectiveness and simplicity, eliminating the need for costly reinforcement learning. Various offline algorithms have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-28 Junbo Li , Zhangyang Wang , Qiang Liu

Direct alignment algorithms have proven an effective step for aligning language models to human-desired behaviors. Current variants of the Direct Preference Optimization objective have focused on a strict setting where all tokens are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Fenia Christopoulou , Ronald Cardenas , Gerasimos Lampouras , Haitham Bou-Ammar , Jun Wang

Human preference evaluations are widely used to compare generative models, yet it remains unclear how many judgments are required to reliably detect small improvements. We show that when preference signal is diffuse across prompts (i.e.,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Wilson Y. Lee

We study the problem of \emph{dynamic regret minimization} in $K$-armed Dueling Bandits under non-stationary or time varying preferences. This is an online learning setup where the agent chooses a pair of items at each round and observes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-14 Aadirupa Saha , Shubham Gupta

We study dueling bandits with weak utility-based regret when preferences over arms have a total order and carry observable feature vectors. The order is assumed to be determined by these feature vectors, an unknown preference vector, and a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-16 Bangrui Chen , Peter I. Frazier

Preference datasets are essential for incorporating human preferences into pre-trained language models, playing a key role in the success of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback. However, these datasets often demonstrate conflicting…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Li Jiang , Yusen Wu , Junwu Xiong , Jingqing Ruan , Yichuan Ding , Qingpei Guo , Zujie Wen , Jun Zhou , Xiaotie Deng

Dueling bandits are widely used to model preferential feedback prevalent in many applications such as recommendation systems and ranking. In this paper, we study the Borda regret minimization problem for dueling bandits, which aims to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-27 Yue Wu , Tao Jin , Hao Lou , Farzad Farnoud , Quanquan Gu

Multi-armed bandits (MAB) are commonly used in sequential online decision-making when the reward of each decision is an unknown random variable. In practice however, the typical goal of maximizing total reward may be less important than…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-22 Ishank Juneja , Carlee Joe-Wong , Osman Yağan

We consider the task of identifying the Copeland winner(s) in a dueling bandits problem with ternary feedback. This is an underexplored but practically relevant variant of the conventional dueling bandits problem, in which, in addition to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-03 Viktor Bengs , Björn Haddenhorst , Eyke Hüllermeier

Recommendation systems when employed in markets play a dual role: they assist users in selecting their most desired items from a large pool and they help in allocating a limited number of items to the users who desire them the most. Despite…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-01 Yigit Efe Erginbas , Soham Phade , Kannan Ramchandran

Most bandit policies are designed to either minimize regret in any problem instance, making very few assumptions about the underlying environment, or in a Bayesian sense, assuming a prior distribution over environment parameters. The former…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-07 Branislav Kveton , Martin Mladenov , Chih-Wei Hsu , Manzil Zaheer , Csaba Szepesvari , Craig Boutilier

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promising abilities as cost-effective and reference-free evaluators for assessing language generation quality. In particular, pairwise LLM evaluators, which compare two generated texts and determine…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Han Zhou , Xingchen Wan , Yinhong Liu , Nigel Collier , Ivan Vulić , Anna Korhonen

Recommendations are commonly used to modify user's natural behavior, for example, increasing product sales or the time spent on a website. This results in a gap between the ultimate business objective and the classical setup where…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2019-05-23 Stephen Bonner , Flavian Vasile

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human feedback is crucial for their development. Existing preference optimization methods such as DPO and KTO, while improved based on Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-23 Shuo Xie , Fangzhi Zhu , Jiahui Wang , Lulu Wen , Wei Dai , Xiaowei Chen , Junxiong Zhu , Kai Zhou , Bo Zheng

We introduce \textit{Feedback Descent}, a framework that optimizes text artifacts -- prompts, code, and molecules -- through structured textual feedback, rather than relying solely on scalar rewards. By preserving detailed critiques instead…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Yoonho Lee , Joseph Boen , Chelsea Finn

Bayesian optimization is a framework for global search via maximum a posteriori updates rather than simulated annealing, and has gained prominence for decision-making under uncertainty. In this work, we cast Bayesian optimization as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-24 Amrit Singh Bedi , Dheeraj Peddireddy , Vaneet Aggarwal , Brian M. Sadler , Alec Koppel

This paper considers how interactions with AI algorithms can boost human creative thought. We employ a psychological task that demonstrates limits on human creativity, namely semantic feature generation: given a concept name, respondents…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-11-20 Ara Vartanian , Xiaoxi Sun , Yun-Shiuan Chuang , Siddharth Suresh , Xiaojin Zhu , Timothy T. Rogers

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a compelling approach for training Large Language Models (LLMs) to adhere to human preferences. However, the performance of DPO is sensitive to the fine-tuning of its trade-off parameter…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Junkang Wu , Yuexiang Xie , Zhengyi Yang , Jiancan Wu , Jinyang Gao , Bolin Ding , Xiang Wang , Xiangnan He

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) relies on preference modeling to align machine learning systems with human values, yet the popular approach of random pair sampling with Bradley-Terry modeling is statistically limited and…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Andreas Chouliaras , Dimitris Chatzopoulos

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) facilitates the alignment of large language models (LLMs) with human preferences, thereby enhancing the quality of responses generated. A critical component of RLHF is the reward model,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Yulan Hu , Qingyang Li , Sheng Ouyang , Ge Chen , Kaihui Chen , Lijun Mei , Xucheng Ye , Fuzheng Zhang , Yong Liu