arXiv Computation and Language

FaST: Feature-aware Sampling and Tuning for Personalized Preference Alignment with Limited Data

arXiv AI
Aug 26

Preference Data Selection for Mitigating the Alignment Tax in Large Language Models

The paper introduces BALIGN, a balanced data selection strategy designed to reduce catastrophic forgetting—referred to as the alignment tax—in large language models during preference-based alignment. By analyzing preference optimization gradients, the authors identify three data-centric features that influence parameter drift: the reference model's log-probability margin, token length differences between chosen and rejected responses, and TF‑IDF similarity to general capability corpora. BALIGN aggregates these features into a composite risk score to filter out high-risk preference samples, thereby preserving foundational capabilities while maintaining alignment gains with minimal computational overhead.

By Minsu Kim, Jianxun Lian, Xing Xie, Steven Euijong Whang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 30

Synthetic Interaction Data for Scalable Personalization in Large Language Models

arXiv:2602. 12394v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Personalized prompting offers large opportunities for deploying large language models (LLMs) to diverse users, yet existing prompt optimization methods primarily focus on task-level optimization while largely overlooking user-specific preferences and latent constraints of individual users.

By Yuchen Ma, Yue Huang, Wenjie Wang, Xiaonan Luo, Xiangliang Zhang, Stefan Feuerriegel