arXiv AI By Pranav Bhandari, Nicolas Fay, Amitava Datta, Usman Naseem, Mehwish Nasim

Beyond Uniform Forgetting: A Study of Sequential Direct Preference Optimization Across Preference Settings

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arXiv:2606. 19744v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Aligning language models with human preferences often requires optimising multiple behavioural objectives.

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arXiv AI
Jun 10

A Comprehensive Survey of Direct Preference Optimization: Datasets, Theories, Variants, and Applications

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 Computation and Language
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GroupDPO: Memory-Efficient Group-Wise Direct Preference Optimization

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
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Instruction Quality Matters: Refining Instructions for Effective Preference Learning

The paper investigates how the quality of instructions used to generate response pairs affects preference learning for language models. It shows that low‑quality or ambiguous instructions limit the range of response quality, weakening preference signals, and introduces an instruction‑refinement pipeline that improves data quality without discarding examples. Experiments across models and benchmarks demonstrate that refining instructions leads to better alignment and complements other data‑improvement methods.

By Seohyeong Lee, Hwaran Lee, Buru Chang
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