arXiv Machine Learning

Alignment-Aware Decoding

arXiv:2509. 26169v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Alignment of large language models remains a central challenge in natural language processing.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 21

Cultural Alignment in Large Language Models Using Soft Prompt Tuning

The paper proposes a method for culturally aligning large language models (LLMs) using soft prompt tuning optimized via Differential Evolution (DE). Unlike traditional fine‑tuning or reinforcement learning, this approach keeps model weights frozen and requires no preference data, instead leveraging aggregated survey scores from Hofstede's Value Survey Module (VSM13). Experiments on four countries and four instruction‑tuned models show that DE‑optimized prompts reduce cultural discrepancy, improve agreement with the World Values Survey, and are preferred in blinded pairwise evaluations by LLM judges.

By Reem I. Masoud, Martin Ferianc, Philip Treleaven, Miguel Rodrigues
arXiv AI
Aug 25

An Empirical Study on Preference Tuning Generalization and Diversity Under Domain Shift

The paper investigates how preference tuning—optimizing language models with explicit preference signals—behaves when applied to new domains. It systematically compares five alignment objectives and several adaptation strategies, such as target‑domain supervised fine‑tuning and pseudo‑labeling, across summarization, question‑answering helpfulness, and safety tasks. Results show that while pseudo‑labeling reduces domain‑shift degradation, it also causes mode collapse, highlighting a trade‑off between generalization and diversity.

By Constantinos Karouzos, Xingwei Tan, Nikolaos Aletras
arXiv AI
3d ago

Ready2Blend: From Natural-Language Instructions to Composable Alignment Prompts

Ready2Blend is a method that blends natural-language instructions with learned alignment prompts to enable continual alignment of large language models without retraining the backbone. It uses AlignFormer to map each requirement to a fixed-length prompt stored in a modular bank, while keeping the backbone and prior prompts frozen. The approach achieves 93.1–98.5% of joint‑training performance, retains prior knowledge, and reduces training time by up to 4.3×, also allowing weighted personalization and order‑free composition.

By Jeesu Jung, Hwan Chang, Juseon Do, Jeonghwan Choi, Jinho Choo, Sungwoo Nam, S. K. Hong, Hwanjun Song
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