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Related papers: Reward-free Alignment for Conflicting Objectives

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Alignment is vital for safely deploying large language models (LLMs). Existing techniques are either reward-based (training a reward model on preference pairs and optimizing with reinforcement learning) or reward-free (directly fine-tuning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Ruoxi Cheng , Haoxuan Ma , Weixin Wang , Ranjie Duan , Jiexi Liu , Xiaoshuang Jia , Simeng Qin , Xiaochun Cao , Yang Liu , Xiaojun Jia

Post-training of LLMs with RLHF, and subsequently preference optimization algorithms such as DPO, IPO, etc., made a big difference in improving human alignment. However, all such techniques can only work with a single (human) objective. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-19 Akhil Agnihotri , Rahul Jain , Deepak Ramachandran , Zheng Wen

With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), aligning them with human values for safety and ethics has become a critical challenge. This problem is especially challenging when multiple, potentially conflicting human values…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Hefei Xu , Le Wu , Chen Cheng , Hao Liu

Naive joint training of large language models (LLMs) for multilingual preference alignment can suffer from negative interference. This is a known issue in multilingual training, where conflicting objectives degrade overall performance.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Jiangnan Li , Thuy-Trang Vu , Christian Herold , Amirhossein Tebbifakhr , Shahram Khadivi , Gholamreza Haffari

Aligning large language models with multiple human expectations and values is crucial for ensuring that they adequately serve a variety of user needs. To this end, offline multiobjective alignment algorithms such as the Rewards-in-Context…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Haoran Gu , Handing Wang , Yi Mei , Mengjie Zhang , Yaochu Jin

Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with accuracy, domain-specific reasoning, and interpretability in vertical domains. Traditional preference alignment methods like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and Direct Preference…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Qihang Yan , Xinyu Zhang , Luming Guo , Qi Zhang , Feifan Liu

Preference-based alignment methods (e.g., RLHF, DPO) typically optimize a single scalar objective, implicitly averaging over heterogeneous human preferences. In practice, systematic annotator and user-group disagreement makes mean-reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Mingxi Zou , Jiaxiang Chen , Junfan Li , Langzhang Liang , Qifan Wang , Xu Yinghui , Zenglin Xu

Aligning large language models (LLMs) to desirable human values requires balancing multiple, potentially conflicting objectives such as helpfulness, truthfulness, and harmlessness, which presents a multi-objective optimisation challenge.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Andor Vári-Kakas , Ji Won Park , Natasa Tagasovska

Reinforcement learning (RL) has significantly advanced the control of physics-based and robotic characters that track kinematic reference motion. However, methods typically rely on a weighted sum of conflicting reward functions, requiring…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Lucas N. Alegre , Agon Serifi , Ruben Grandia , David Müller , Espen Knoop , Moritz Bächer

Alignment via reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has become the dominant paradigm for controlling the quality of outputs from large language models (LLMs). However, existing theories do not provide strong justification for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Jihun Yun , Juno Kim , Jongho Park , Junhyuck Kim , Jongha Jon Ryu , Jaewoong Cho , Kwang-Sung Jun

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has become a prominent method for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences. While DPO has enabled significant progress in aligning English LLMs, multilingual preference alignment is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Wen Yang , Junhong Wu , Chen Wang , Chengqing Zong , Jiajun Zhang

Multimodal LLMs often produce fluent yet unreliable reasoning, exhibiting weak step-to-step coherence and insufficient visual grounding, largely because existing alignment approaches supervise only the final answer while ignoring the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Jesen Zhang , Ningyuan Liu , Kaitong Cai , Sidi Liu , Jing Yang , Ziliang Chen , Xiaofei Sun , Keze Wang

Machine unlearning for large language models (LLMs) aims to remove targeted knowledge while preserving general capability. In this paper, we recast LLM unlearning as an asymmetric two-task problem: retention is the primary objective and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Zeguan Xiao , Siqing Li , Yong Wang , Xuetao Wei , Jian Yang , Yun Chen , Guanhua Chen

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

Reinforcement Learning (RL) robot controllers usually aggregate many task objectives into one scalar reward. While large-scale proximal policy optimisation (PPO) has enabled impressive results such as robust robot locomotion in the real…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Humphrey Munn , Brendan Tidd , Peter Böhm , Marcus Gallagher , David Howard

Our goal is to enable large language models (LLMs) to balance multiple human preference dimensions; such as helpfulness, safety, and verbosity, through principled and controllable alignment. Existing preference optimization methods,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Mete Erdogan

The alignment of large language models (LLMs) with human preferences remains a key challenge. While post-training techniques like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) have achieved…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-11 Qingyu Yin , Chak Tou Leong , Minjun Zhu , Hanqi Yan , Qiang Zhang , Yulan He , Wenjie Li , Jun Wang , Yue Zhang , Linyi Yang

Alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) aims to align outputs with human preferences, and personalized alignment further adapts models to individual users. This relies on personalized reward models that capture user-specific preferences…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Hongru Cai , Yongqi Li , Tiezheng Yu , Fengbin Zhu , Wenjie Wang , Fuli Feng , Wenjie Li

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been used to finetune Large Language Models (LLMs) using a reward model trained from preference data, to better align with human judgment. The recently introduced direct alignment methods, which are often…

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