arXiv:2607. 03248v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The alignment of large language models with human preferences is commonly achieved through Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback or Direct Preference Optimization.
By Jialiang Wang, Xianming Liu, Xiong Zhou, Hui Liu, Haoliang Li
arXiv:2509. 23982v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Preference alignment is a critical step in making Large Language Models (LLMs) useful and aligned with (human) preferences.
By Lucio La Cava, Andrea Tagarelli
arXiv:2609.06893v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Direct preference optimization DPO is a promising offline approach for aligning large language models (LLMs) due to its simplicity, computational eff...
By Wenbo Zhang, Wenzhuo Zhou, Hengrui Cai, Zhengling Qi
The paper introduces Comparison-based Preference Optimization (ComPO), a zeroth-order method that aligns large language models with human preferences using comparison oracles instead of direct differentiable loss optimization. It provides theoretical convergence guarantees for both offline and online variants under smoothness, gradient sparsity, and oracle compatibility assumptions, and establishes performance bounds under local coverage and in-distribution reward accuracy. Experiments on several LLMs (Mistral, Llama, Gemma-2, Qwen3, Gemma-3) show that ComPO outperforms existing direct alignment methods, achieving higher length-controlled win rates and diagnostics that suggest mitigation of likelihood displacement.
By Peter Chen, Xi Chen, Wotao Yin, Tianyi Lin
arXiv:2410. 15595v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), aligning policy models with human preferences has become increasingly critical.
By Wenyi Xiao, Zechuan Wang, Leilei Gan, Shuai Zhao, Zongrui Li, Ruirui Lei, Wanggui He, Luu Anh Tuan, Long Chen, Hao Jiang, Zhou Zhao, Fei Wu
arXiv:2609.05899v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Aligning large language models with human preferences remains a challenge, primarily due to the critical role of preference data quality in effective...
By Peng Lai, He Zhu, Zhiwen Ruan, Dongdong Zhang, Yun Chen, Peng Li, Furu Wei, Yang Liu, Guanhua Chen
The paper introduces Personalized Group Relative Policy Optimization (P‑GRPO), a new alignment framework for large language models that separates advantage estimation from immediate batch statistics. By normalizing advantages using preference‑group‑specific reward histories instead of the concurrent generation group, P‑GRPO maintains contrastive signals for distinct user preferences. Experiments across various tasks show that P‑GRPO converges faster and yields higher rewards than standard GRPO, improving alignment with heterogeneous human preferences while preserving general capabilities.
By Jialu Wang, Heinrich Peters, Asad A. Butt, Navid Hashemi, Alireza Hashemi, Pouya M. Ghari, Joseph Hoover, James Rae, Morteza Dehghani
Aligning large language models to human preferences is crucial for real-world deployment but frequently incurs an alignment tax, leading to the catastrophic forgetting of pre-trained general capabilit...
arXiv:2606. 30339v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Aligning large language models (LLMs) with diverse user preferences is a critical yet challenging task.
By Fuxiang Zhang, Pengcheng Wang, Chenran Li, Yi-Chen Li, Yuxin Chen, Lang Feng, Chenfeng Xu, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Bo An
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:2608.30902v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Adapting large language models to user-specific preferences is often constrained by the cost of human annotation, making preference optimisation imprac...
By Alessio Galatolo, Meriem Beloucif
GroupDPO introduces a memory‑efficient approach to group‑wise direct preference optimization for aligning large language models. By using first‑order linearization with per‑response coefficients, the method decouples samples during backpropagation, dramatically reducing peak memory usage and enabling scalable training with larger groups. Experiments in both offline and online settings show that leveraging multiple responses consistently outperforms single‑pair training, and adding a negative log‑likelihood term on positive responses is essential for performance gains and training stability.
By Jixuan Leng, Si Si, Hsiang-Fu Yu, Vinod Raman, Inderjit S. Dhillon