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

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Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has been widely adopted for large language model alignment due to its simple training procedure and lack of an explicit reward model. However, in iterative DPO, when the policy model from the previous…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Lingling Fu , Yongfu Xu

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive performance but lack the flexibility to adapt to human preferences quickly without retraining. In this work, we introduce Test-time Preference Optimization (TPO), a framework that aligns…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-23 Yafu Li , Xuyang Hu , Xiaoye Qu , Linjie Li , Yu Cheng

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as an effective approach for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, its performance is highly dependent on the quality of the underlying human preference data.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Zixuan Huang , Yikun Ban , Lean Fu , Xiaojie Li , Zhongxiang Dai , Jianxin Li , Deqing Wang

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences is critical for real-world deployment, yet existing methods like RLHF face computational and stability challenges. While DPO establishes an offline paradigm with single…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Junkang Wu , Kexin Huang , Xue Wang , Jinyang Gao , Bolin Ding , Jiancan Wu , Xiangnan He , Xiang Wang

Post-training of language models, either through reinforcement learning, preference optimization or supervised finetuning, tends to sharpen the output probability distribution and reduce the diversity of generated responses. This is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-23 Jack Lanchantin , Angelica Chen , Shehzaad Dhuliawala , Ping Yu , Jason Weston , Sainbayar Sukhbaatar , Ilia Kulikov

Recent developments in Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) allow large language models (LLMs) to function as implicit ranking models by maximizing the margin between preferred and non-preferred responses. In practice, user feedback on such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Junda Wu , Rohan Surana , Zhouhang Xie , Yiran Shen , Yu Xia , Tong Yu , Ryan A. Rossi , Prithviraj Ammanabrolu , Julian McAuley

Many algorithms for aligning LLMs with human preferences assume that human preferences are binary and deterministic. However, human preferences can vary across individuals, and therefore should be represented distributionally. In this work,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-31 Hiroki Furuta , Kuang-Huei Lee , Shixiang Shane Gu , Yutaka Matsuo , Aleksandra Faust , Heiga Zen , Izzeddin Gur

The rapidly increasing capabilities of large language models (LLMs) raise an urgent need to align AI systems with diverse human preferences to simultaneously enhance their usefulness and safety, despite the often conflicting nature of these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-06 Zixuan Liu , Xiaolin Sun , Zizhan Zheng

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is an effective approach for aligning protein language models with experimental design goals. However, DPO faces a scalability bottleneck: the number of possible training pairs grows quadratically with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Constance Ferragu , Jonathan D. Ziegler , Nicolas Deutschmann , Arthur Lindoulsi , Eli Bixby , Cradle ML Team

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has become a standard recipe for aligning large language models, yet it is still unclear what kind of change it actually induces inside the network. This paper argues that DPO does not rewrite a models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Samarth Raina , Saksham Aggarwal , Aman Chadha , Vinija Jain , Amitava Das

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

Instruction following (IF) is a critical capability for large language models (LLMs). However, handling complex instructions with multiple constraints remains challenging. Previous methods typically select preference pairs based on the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Xiang Huang , Ting-En Lin , Feiteng Fang , Yuchuan Wu , Hangyu Li , Yuzhong Qu , Fei Huang , Yongbin Li

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

AI alignment in the shape of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is increasingly treated as a crucial ingredient for high performance large language models. Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has been positioned by recent…

Large language models (LLMs), despite their extensive pretraining on diverse datasets, require effective alignment to human preferences for practical and reliable deployment. Conventional alignment methods typically employ off-policy…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Hyeonji Lee , Daejin Jo , Seohwan Yun , Sungwoong Kim

Large language models exhibit impressive reasoning capabilities yet frequently generate plausible but incorrect solutions, a phenomenon commonly termed hallucination. This paper investigates the effect of training objective composition on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Murtaza Nikzad , Raghuram Ramanujan

In this paper, we introduce \emph{refined Direct Preference Optimization} (rDPO), a method for improving the behavioral alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) without the need for human-annotated data. The method involves creating…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-14 Víctor Gallego

Machine unlearning aims to efficiently eliminate the influence of specific training data, known as the forget set, from the model. However, existing unlearning methods for Large Language Models (LLMs) face a critical challenge: they rely…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-23 Anmol Mekala , Vineeth Dorna , Shreya Dubey , Abhishek Lalwani , David Koleczek , Mukund Rungta , Sadid Hasan , Elita Lobo

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

The generated responses of large language models (LLMs) are often fine-tuned to human preferences through a process called reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). As RLHF relies on a challenging training sequence, whereby a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Xiangkun Hu , Lemin Kong , Tong He , David Wipf