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The widespread application of large language models (LLMs) raises increasing demands on ensuring safety or imposing constraints, such as reducing harmful content and adhering to predefined rules. While there have been several works studying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Yihan Du , Seo Taek Kong , R. Srikant

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has become a widely used training method for the instruction fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs). In this work, we explore an under-investigated aspect of DPO - its dependency on the reference…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-23 Yixin Liu , Pengfei Liu , Arman Cohan

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

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is increasingly viewed as a tree pruning mechanism. However, we identify a systemic pathology termed Recursive Space Contraction (RSC), an irreversible collapse driven by the combined…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Tianyi Wang , Long Li , Hongcan Guo , Yibiao Chen , Yixia Li , Yong Wang , Yun Chen , Guanhua Chen

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) to align with human preferences has driven the success of systems such as Gemini and ChatGPT. However, approaches like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) remain computationally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Miria Feng , Mert Pilanci

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as an effective approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), especially in scenarios where supervised fine-tuning (SFT) falls short due to limited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Jian Xiong , Jingbo Zhou , Jingyong Ye , Qiang Huang , Dejing Dou

Self-play alignment has emerged as an effective approach for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs), formulating preference optimization as a two-player game. However, the regularization with respect to the reference policy, which is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-09 Xiaohang Tang , Sangwoong Yoon , Seongho Son , Huizhuo Yuan , Quanquan Gu , Ilija Bogunovic

In this note, we examine the aggregation of preferences achieved by the Group Policy Optimisation (GRPO) algorithm, a reinforcement learning method used to train advanced artificial intelligence models such as DeepSeek-R1-Zero and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-14 Milan Vojnovic , Se-Young Yun

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 alignment is crucial for ensuring that large language models (LLMs) align with human preferences, yet it often involves sensitive user data, raising significant privacy concerns. While prior work has integrated differential…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-05-15 Keyu Chen , Hao Tang , Qinglin Liu , Yizhao Xu

Direct preference optimization (\texttt{DPO}) has emerged as a promising approach for solving the alignment problem in AI. In this paper, we make two counter-intuitive observations about \texttt{DPO}. First, we show that \texttt{DPO} loss…

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…

Offline preference optimization offers a simpler and more stable alternative to RLHF for aligning language models. However, their effectiveness is critically dependent on ranking accuracy, a metric where further gains are highly impactful.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Ruibo Deng , Duanyu Feng , Wenqiang Lei

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

Contrastive learning models have demonstrated impressive abilities to capture semantic similarities by aligning representations in the embedding space. However, their performance can be limited by the quality of the training data and its…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-27 Amirabbas Afzali , Borna Khodabandeh , Ali Rasekh , Mahyar JafariNodeh , Sepehr kazemi , Simon Gottschalk

In the field of large language models (LLMs), aligning models with the diverse preferences of users is a critical challenge. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has played a key role in this area. It works by using pairs of preferences…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-29 Yueqin Yin , Zhendong Wang , Yi Gu , Hai Huang , Weizhu Chen , Mingyuan Zhou

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful tool for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) to improve complex reasoning abilities. However, state-of-the-art policy optimization methods often suffer from high computational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Kianté Brantley , Mingyu Chen , Zhaolin Gao , Jason D. Lee , Wen Sun , Wenhao Zhan , Xuezhou Zhang

Efficient preference optimization algorithms such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) have become a popular approach in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. These algorithms implicitly treat the LLM as a reward…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Tong Liu , Xiao Yu , Wenxuan Zhou , Jindong Gu , Volker Tresp

Reinforcement Learning(RL) with sparse rewards is a major challenge. We propose \emph{Hindsight Trust Region Policy Optimization}(HTRPO), a new RL algorithm that extends the highly successful TRPO algorithm with \emph{hindsight} to tackle…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-18 Hanbo Zhang , Site Bai , Xuguang Lan , David Hsu , Nanning Zheng

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable progress in text-to-image generation, yet aligning them with human preference remains challenging due to the presence of multiple, sometimes conflicting, evaluation metrics (e.g., semantic…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Dipesh Tamboli , Souradip Chakraborty , Aditya Malusare , Biplab Banerjee , Amrit Singh Bedi , Vaneet Aggarwal