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Online and offline RLHF methods, such as PPO and DPO, have been highly successful in aligning AI with human preferences. Despite their success, however, these methods suffer from fundamental limitations: (a) Models trained with RLHF can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Eugene Choi , Arash Ahmadian , Matthieu Geist , Oilvier Pietquin , Mohammad Gheshlaghi Azar

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

Traditional preference tuning methods for LLMs/Visual Generative Models often rely solely on reward model labeling, which can be opaque, offer limited insights into the rationale behind preferences, and are prone to issues such as reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Hanyang Zhao , Haoxian Chen , Yucheng Guo , Genta Indra Winata , Tingting Ou , Ziyu Huang , David D. Yao , Wenpin Tang

Learning from preference-based feedback has recently gained traction as a promising approach to align language models with human interests. While these aligned generative models have demonstrated impressive capabilities across various…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-15 Sayak Ray Chowdhury , Anush Kini , Nagarajan Natarajan

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a widely used reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) method across various domains. Recent research has increasingly focused on the role of token importance in improving DPO effectiveness.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Jian Li , Shenglin Yin , Yujia Zhang , Alan Zhao , Xi Chen , Xiaohui Zhou , Pengfei Xu

Recent advancements in post-training methodologies for large language models (LLMs) have highlighted reinforcement learning (RL) as a critical component for enhancing reasoning. However, the substantial computational costs associated with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Songjun Tu , Jiahao Lin , Xiangyu Tian , Qichao Zhang , Linjing Li , Yuqian Fu , Nan Xu , Wei He , Xiangyuan Lan , Dongmei Jiang , Dongbin Zhao

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences has gained significant attention, with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) as a standard yet computationally expensive method and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) as a more…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Yuzi Yan , Yibo Miao , Jialian Li , Yipin Zhang , Jian Xie , Zhijie Deng , Dong Yan

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has recently emerged as a simple and effective alternative to reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) for aligning large language models (LLMs) with user preferences. However, existing DPO…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Jason Bohne , Pawel Polak , David Rosenberg , Brian Bloniarz , Gary Kazantsev

Preference-based alignment objectives have been widely adopted, from RLHF-style pairwise learning in large language models to emerging applications in recommender systems. Yet, existing work rarely examines how Direct Preference…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Hejin Huang , Jusheng Zhang , Kaitong Cai , Jian Wang , Rong Pan

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a reliable approach to aligning large language models (LLMs) to human preferences. Among the plethora of RLHF techniques, proximal policy optimization (PPO) is of the most…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-06 Banghua Zhu , Hiteshi Sharma , Felipe Vieira Frujeri , Shi Dong , Chenguang Zhu , Michael I. Jordan , Jiantao Jiao

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…

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a promising paradigm for post-training reasoning models. However, group-based methods such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) face a critical dilemma in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Yuning Wu , Ke Wang , Devin Chen , Kai Wei

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

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

The alignment of language models with human preferences is vital for their application in real-world tasks. The problem is formulated as optimizing the model's policy to maximize the expected reward that reflects human preferences with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Haozhe Ji , Cheng Lu , Yilin Niu , Pei Ke , Hongning Wang , Jun Zhu , Jie Tang , Minlie Huang

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

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) trains a language model using human preference data, bypassing the explicit reward modeling phase of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). By iterating over sentence pairs in a preference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Jae Hyeon Cho , Minkyung Park , Byung-Jun Lee

Using reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) has shown significant promise in fine-tuning diffusion models. Previous methods start by training a reward model that aligns with human preferences, then leverage RL techniques to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-26 Kai Yang , Jian Tao , Jiafei Lyu , Chunjiang Ge , Jiaxin Chen , Qimai Li , Weihan Shen , Xiaolong Zhu , Xiu Li

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has been popular for aligning text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models with human preferences. As a mainstream branch of RLHF, Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) offers a computationally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Jiaming Hu , Jiamu Bai , Haoyu Wang , Debarghya Mukherjee , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis

Alignment of large language models (LLMs) has predominantly relied on pairwise preference optimization, where annotators select the better of two responses to a prompt. While simple, this approach overlooks the opportunity to learn from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Yuxuan Tang , Yifan Feng