arXiv AI
1d ago

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
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

When Can Conditional Flow Matching Replace Pointwise Negative Log-Likelihood?

The paper investigates when conditional flow matching (CFM) can replace pointwise negative log-likelihood (NLL) calculations. It shows that for linear Gaussian paths, the endpoint NLL can be exactly decomposed into entropy, a weighted CFM objective, and residual terms, meaning CFM-only estimates are exact only when these residuals cancel. The study finds that ordinary CFM is generally not a pointwise NLL estimator, and even weighted variants may not fully eliminate bias, especially in training or on‑policy settings, with experiments confirming these theoretical insights.

By Yansen Han, Hongxin Sun, Tao Lin