arXiv Machine Learning

Learning Mixtures of Plackett-Luce Models for Multi-Objective Alignment

The paper introduces MoPLEx, an expectation‑maximization algorithm for learning mixtures of Plackett‑Luce models from multi‑way ranking data. It augments rankings with synthetic responses from a base language model and uses a gradient‑based estimation to reduce inference cost, enabling efficient fitting of large‑scale models. Experiments show the method achieves low probability estimation error and improves clustering and ranking accuracy by 43.7% and 15.2% over baselines.

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 AI
Sep 17

A Zeroth-Order Paradigm for LLM Preference Alignment

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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 17

UniPolicy: Unified Objective-Specific Policies for Generative Search Advertising

UniPolicy is a multi-policy alignment framework for search advertising that jointly optimizes relevance, click propensity, and commercial value. It uses objective-specific prefix tokens, sparse MoE-LoRA routing, and residual FFNs to decouple parameters within a shared backbone, and builds pairwise preferences from multi-stage behavioral feedback to improve generation. In large-scale offline tests and a 7‑day online A/B test, UniPolicy achieved balanced gains across metrics, boosting CTR by 0.71%, RPS by 1.58%, and revenue by 1.32% while keeping latency stable.

arXiv AI
2d ago

Gradient-Aligned Pair Selection for Personalized Preference Optimization

The paper introduces GAP-DPO, a method for personalizing large language models by selecting preference pairs based on gradient alignment with user utility. It formalizes personalized preference learning as a geometry‑aligned optimization problem, showing that off‑policy sampling can shift DPO updates from error correction to reinforcement when preference margins align with utility gradients. Experiments demonstrate that GAP‑DPO improves stylistic fidelity, preference alignment, and overall generation quality over standard DPO variants.

By Ruoming Jin, Xinyu Li, Hao Zhou, Jianfeng Zhu, Ruixin Guo, Feodor Dragan, Lei Xu, Haixun Wang, Yang Zhou