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Related papers: APO: Alpha-Divergence Preference Optimization

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We propose Process-Aware Policy Optimization (PAPO), a method that integrates process-level evaluation into Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) through decoupled advantage normalization, to address two limitations of existing reward…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Zelin Tan , Zhouliang Yu , Bohan Lin , Zijie Geng , Hejia Geng , Yudong Zhang , Mulei Zhang , Yang Chen , Shuyue Hu , Zhenfei Yin , Chen Zhang , Lei Bai

While astonishingly capable, large Language Models (LLM) can sometimes produce outputs that deviate from human expectations. Such deviations necessitate an alignment phase to prevent disseminating untruthful, toxic, or biased information.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-30 Long Tan Le , Han Shu , Tung-Anh Nguyen , Choong Seon Hong , Nguyen H. Tran

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

Reinforcement learning improves LLM reasoning, but PPO/GRPO typically use fixed clipping and decoding temperature, which makes training brittle and tuning-heavy. We propose Adaptive Group Policy Optimization (AGPO), a critic-free refinement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Miaobo Hu , Shuhao Hu , Bokun Wang , Ruohan Wang , Xin Wang , Xiaobo Guo , Daren Zha , Jun Xiao

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) guides large language models (LLMs) to generate recommendations aligned with user historical behavior distributions by minimizing preference alignment loss. However, our systematic empirical research and…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Chu Zhao , Enneng Yang , Jianzhe Zhao , Guibing Guo

Balancing exploration and exploitation during reinforcement learning fine-tuning of generative models presents a critical challenge, as existing approaches rely on fixed divergence regularization that creates an inherent dilemma: strong…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Jiajun Fan , Tong Wei , Chaoran Cheng , Yuxin Chen , Ge Liu

Streaming autoregressive (AR) video generators combined with few-step distillation achieve low-latency, high-quality synthesis, yet remain difficult to align via reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Existing SDE-based GRPO…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Dailan He , Guanlin Feng , Xingtong Ge , Yi Zhang , Bingqi Ma , Guanglu Song , Yu Liu , Hongsheng Li

Reinforcement Learning (RL) for constrained MDPs (CMDPs) is an increasingly important problem for various applications. Often, the average criterion is more suitable than the discounted criterion. Yet, RL for average-CMDPs (ACMDPs) remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-27 Akhil Agnihotri , Rahul Jain , Haipeng Luo

Large language models (LLMs) are fine-tuned using human comparison data with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) methods to make them better aligned with users' preferences. In contrast to LLMs, human preference learning has…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-11-23 Bram Wallace , Meihua Dang , Rafael Rafailov , Linqi Zhou , Aaron Lou , Senthil Purushwalkam , Stefano Ermon , Caiming Xiong , Shafiq Joty , Nikhil Naik

Preference Optimization (PO), is gaining popularity as an alternative choice of Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs). Recent research on aligning LLMs iteratively with synthetic or partially synthetic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-16 Yaojie Shen , Xinyao Wang , Yulei Niu , Ying Zhou , Lexin Tang , Libo Zhang , Fan Chen , Longyin Wen

Safety alignment is critical in pre-training large language models (LLMs) to generate responses aligned with human values and refuse harmful queries. Unlike LLM, the current safety alignment of VLMs is often achieved with post-hoc safety…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Fenghua Weng , Jian Lou , Jun Feng , Minlie Huang , Wenjie Wang

Current RLHF methods such as PPO and DPO typically reduce human preferences to binary labels, which are costly to obtain and too coarse to reflect individual variation. We observe that expressions of satisfaction and dissatisfaction follow…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 YuXuan Zhang

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models such as OpenVLA, Octo, and $\pi_0$ have shown strong generalization by leveraging large-scale demonstrations, yet their performance is still fundamentally constrained by the quality and coverage of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Mingyang Lyu , Yinqian Sun , Erliang Lin , Huangrui Li , Ruolin Chen , Feifei Zhao , Yi Zeng

Standard human preference-based alignment methods, such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), are a cornerstone for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values. However, these methods typically assume that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Xiaoyang Cao , Zelai Xu , Mo Guang , Kaiwen Long , Michiel A. Bakker , Yu Wang , Chao Yu

Direct Preference Optimisation (DPO) is widely used for safety alignment in large language models. However, prior work shows it is brittle and exhibits poor out-of-distribution (OOD) generalisation. In this paper, we investigate whether…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Sandeep Kumar , Virginia Smith , Chhavi Yadav

Online on-policy preference learning algorithms for language model alignment such as online direct policy optimization (DPO) can significantly outperform their offline counterparts. We provide a theoretical explanation for this phenomenon…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Juno Kim , Jihun Yun , Jason D. Lee , Kwang-Sung Jun

Despite Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) dominating policy gradient methods -- from robotic control to game AI -- its static trust region forces a brittle trade-off: aggressive clipping stifles early exploration, while late-stage updates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Ben Rahman

In this paper, we aim to align large language models with the ever-changing, complex, and diverse human values (e.g., social norms) across time and locations. This presents a challenge to existing alignment techniques, such as supervised…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-27 Chunpu Xu , Steffi Chern , Ethan Chern , Ge Zhang , Zekun Wang , Ruibo Liu , Jing Li , Jie Fu , Pengfei Liu

Very recently proximal policy optimization (PPO) algorithms have been proposed as first-order optimization methods for effective reinforcement learning. While PPO is inspired by the same learning theory that justifies trust region policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-04-20 Gang Chen , Yiming Peng , Mengjie Zhang

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