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Related papers: What Is Preference Optimization Doing, and Why?

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Learning from human preference is a paradigm used in large-scale language model (LLM) fine-tuning step to better align pretrained LLM to human preference for downstream task. In the past it uses reinforcement learning from human feedback…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-09-02 Shiming Xie , Hong Chen , Fred Yu , Zeye Sun , Xiuyu Wu , Yingfan Hu

As large language models (LLMs) become more capable, fine-tuning techniques for aligning with human intent are increasingly important. A key consideration for aligning these models is how to most effectively use human resources, or model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-01 William Muldrew , Peter Hayes , Mingtian Zhang , David Barber

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has become a popular approach for aligning language models using pairwise preferences. However, in practical post-training pipelines, on-policy generation typically yields multiple candidate responses…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Taneesh Gupta , Rahul Madhavan , Xuchao Zhang , Nagarajan Natarajan , Chetan Bansal , Saravan Rajmohan

For aligning large language models (LLMs), prior work has leveraged reinforcement learning via human feedback (RLHF) or variations of direct preference optimization (DPO). While DPO offers a simpler framework based on maximum likelihood…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Anirudhan Badrinath , Prabhat Agarwal , Jiajing Xu

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a widely adopted offline algorithm for preference-based reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), designed to improve training simplicity and stability by redefining reward functions.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Gengxu Li , Tingyu Xia , Yi Chang , Yuan Wu

This study evaluates Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and its variants for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences, testing three configurations: (1) with Supervised Fine Tuning (SFT), (2) without SFT, and (3)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Amir Saeidi , Shivanshu Verma , Md Nayem Uddin , Chitta Baral

While large-scale unsupervised language models (LMs) learn broad world knowledge and some reasoning skills, achieving precise control of their behavior is difficult due to the completely unsupervised nature of their training. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-31 Rafael Rafailov , Archit Sharma , Eric Mitchell , Stefano Ermon , Christopher D. Manning , Chelsea Finn

Despite the efficacy of Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) in aligning Large Language Models (LLMs), reward hacking remains a pivotal challenge. This issue emerges when LLMs excessively reduce the probability of rejected completions to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Chenxu Yang , Ruipeng Jia , Mingyu Zheng , Naibin Gu , Zheng Lin , Siyuan Chen , Weichong Yin , Hua Wu , Weiping Wang

Aligning large language models (LLMs) is a central objective of post-training, often achieved through reward modeling and reinforcement learning methods. Among these, direct preference optimization (DPO) has emerged as a widely adopted…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Aladin Djuhera , Farhan Ahmed , Swanand Ravindra Kadhe , Syed Zawad , Heiko Ludwig , Holger Boche

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

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

Direct alignment methods typically train large language models (LLMs) by contrasting the likelihoods of preferred and dispreferred responses. While effective at capturing relative preferences, these methods are widely observed to suppress…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Kaiyang Guo , Yinchuan Li , Zhitang Chen

Language model (LM) post-training (or alignment) involves maximizing a reward function that is derived from preference annotations. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a popular offline alignment method that trains a policy directly on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Adam Fisch , Jacob Eisenstein , Vicky Zayats , Alekh Agarwal , Ahmad Beirami , Chirag Nagpal , Pete Shaw , Jonathan Berant

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

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

Direct preference optimization (DPO) has emerged as a promising approach for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, the widespread reliance on the response-level Bradley-Terry (BT) model may limit its full…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Masanari Oi , Mahiro Ukai , Masahiro Kaneko , Naoaki Okazaki , Nakamasa Inoue

Preference optimization has made significant progress recently, with numerous methods developed to align language models with human preferences. This paper introduces $f$-divergence Preference Optimization ($f$-PO), a novel framework that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Jiaqi Han , Mingjian Jiang , Yuxuan Song , Stefano Ermon , Minkai Xu

The alignment of language models~(LMs) with human preferences is critical for building reliable AI systems. The problem is typically framed as optimizing an LM policy to maximize the expected reward that reflects human preferences.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Zetian Sun , Dongfang Li , Xuhui Chen , Baotian Hu , Min Zhang

Direct preference optimization (DPO) is a successful fine-tuning strategy for aligning large language models with human preferences without the need to train a reward model or employ reinforcement learning. DPO, as originally formulated,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Afra Amini , Tim Vieira , Ryan Cotterell