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Existing observational approaches for learning human preferences, such as inverse reinforcement learning, usually make strong assumptions about the observability of the human's environment. However, in reality, people make many important…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-10-29 Cassidy Laidlaw , Stuart Russell

Pairwise re-ranking models predict which of two documents is more relevant to a query and then aggregate a final ranking from such preferences. This is often more effective than pointwise re-ranking models that directly predict a relevance…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-07-12 Lukas Gienapp , Maik Fröbe , Matthias Hagen , Martin Potthast

Direct Preference Learning has emerged as a dominant offline paradigm for preference optimization. Most of these methods are based on the Bradley-Terry (BT) model for pairwise preference ranking, which directly aligns language model with…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Chengtao Jian , Kai Yang , Tianhao Gao , Wuguang Ni , Keying Yang , Bowen Xiao , Jiajun Liu , Ye Ouyang

We address the problem of learning a ranking by using adaptively chosen pairwise comparisons. Our goal is to recover the ranking accurately but to sample the comparisons sparingly. If all comparison outcomes are consistent with the ranking,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-06-16 Lucas Maystre , Matthias Grossglauser

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human intent is critical for enhancing their performance across a variety of tasks. Standard alignment techniques, such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), often rely on the binary…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Yuxiang Guo , Lu Yin , Bo Jiang , Jiaqi Zhang

User preference learning is generally a hard problem. Individual preferences are typically unknown even to users themselves, while the space of choices is infinite. Here we study user preference learning from information-theoretic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-27 Tanya Ignatenko , Kirill Kondrashov , Marco Cox , Bert de Vries

Pairwise difference learning (PDL) has recently been introduced as a new meta-learning technique for regression. Instead of learning a mapping from instances to outcomes in the standard way, the key idea is to learn a function that takes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-01 Mohamed Karim Belaid , Maximilian Rabus , Eyke Hüllermeier

We study metric learning from preference comparisons under the ideal point model, in which a user prefers an item over another if it is closer to their latent ideal item. These items are embedded into $\mathbb{R}^d$ equipped with an unknown…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-15 Zhi Wang , Geelon So , Ramya Korlakai Vinayak

Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently proven effective at scaling chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning in large language models for tasks with verifiable answers. However, extending RL-based thought training to more general non-verifiable…

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a powerful approach for aligning generative models, but its reliance on learned reward models makes it vulnerable to mis-specification and reward hacking. Preference-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Akhil Agnihotri , Rahul Jain , Deepak Ramachandran , Zheng Wen

Ranking or assessing centrality in multivariate and non-Euclidean data is difficult because there is no canonical order and many depth notions become computationally fragile in high-dimensional or structured settings. We introduce a…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-24 Lingfeng Lyu , Doudou Zhou

We introduce a new model of teaching named "preference-based teaching" and a corresponding complexity parameter---the preference-based teaching dimension (PBTD)---representing the worst-case number of examples needed to teach any concept in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-02-09 Ziyuan Gao , Christoph Ries , Hans Ulrich Simon , Sandra Zilles

Many applications, e.g. in content recommendation, sports, or recruitment, leverage the comparisons of alternatives to score those alternatives. The classical Bradley-Terry model and its variants have been widely used to do so. The…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-02-23 Julien Fageot , Sadegh Farhadkhani , Lê Nguyên Hoang , Oscar Villemaud

Large language models (LLMs) generally utilize a consistent data distribution throughout the pretraining process. However, as the model's capability improves, it is intuitive that its data preferences dynamically change, indicating the need…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Xuemiao Zhang , Liangyu Xu , Feiyu Duan , Yongwei Zhou , Sirui Wang , Rongxiang Weng , Jingang Wang , Xunliang Cai

Pareto front learning is a technique that introduces preference vectors in a neural network to approximate the Pareto front. Previous Pareto front learning methods have demonstrated high performance in approximating simple Pareto fronts.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-15 Rongguang Ye , Lei Chen , Weiduo Liao , Jinyuan Zhang , Hisao Ishibuchi

Preference learning, or the task of aligning generative models to preference comparison data, has yet to reach the conceptual maturity of classification, density estimation, etc. To close this gap, this work presents a framework to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Lily H. Zhang , Rajesh Ranganath

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have been remarkable, with new models consistently surpassing their predecessors. These advancements are underpinned by extensive research on various training mechanisms. Among these,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-12 Hansle Gwon , Imjin Ahn , Young-Hak Kim , Sanghyun Park , Tae Joon Jun

Decision-making problems often feature uncertainty stemming from heterogeneous and context-dependent human preferences. To address this, we propose a sequential learning-and-optimization pipeline to learn preference distributions and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Benjamin Hudson , Laurent Charlin , Emma Frejinger

Estimating consumer preferences is central to many problems in economics and marketing. This paper develops a flexible framework for learning individual preferences from partial ranking information by interpreting observed rankings as…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-19 Yu-Chang Chen , Chen Chian Fuh , Shang En Tsai

We study the ranking of individuals, teams, or objects, based on pairwise comparisons between them, using the Bradley-Terry model. Estimates of rankings within this model are commonly made using a simple iterative algorithm first introduced…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-08-16 M. E. J. Newman