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Main Authors: Zou, Xiandong, Lin, Wanyu, Li, Yuchen, Zhou, Pan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.14400
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author Zou, Xiandong
Lin, Wanyu
Li, Yuchen
Zhou, Pan
author_facet Zou, Xiandong
Lin, Wanyu
Li, Yuchen
Zhou, Pan
contents Aligning Large Language Model (LLM) responses with human preferences is vital for building safe and controllable AI systems. While preference optimization methods based on Plackett-Luce (PL) and Bradley-Terry (BT) models have shown promise, they face challenges such as poor handling of harmful content, inefficient use of dispreferred responses, and, specifically for PL, high computational costs. To address these issues, we propose Hard Preference Sampling (HPS), a novel framework for robust and efficient human preference alignment. HPS introduces a training loss that prioritizes the most preferred response while rejecting all dispreferred and harmful ones. It emphasizes "hard" dispreferred responses -- those closely resembling preferred ones -- to enhance the model's rejection capabilities. By leveraging a single-sample Monte Carlo sampling strategy, HPS reduces computational overhead while maintaining alignment quality. Theoretically, HPS improves sample efficiency over existing PL methods and maximizes the reward margin between preferred and dispreferred responses, ensuring clearer distinctions. Experiments on HH-RLHF and PKU-Safety datasets validate HPS's effectiveness, achieving comparable BLEU and reward scores while greatly improving reward margins and thus reducing harmful content generation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_14400
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publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle HPS: Hard Preference Sampling for Human Preference Alignment
Zou, Xiandong
Lin, Wanyu
Li, Yuchen
Zhou, Pan
Artificial Intelligence
Aligning Large Language Model (LLM) responses with human preferences is vital for building safe and controllable AI systems. While preference optimization methods based on Plackett-Luce (PL) and Bradley-Terry (BT) models have shown promise, they face challenges such as poor handling of harmful content, inefficient use of dispreferred responses, and, specifically for PL, high computational costs. To address these issues, we propose Hard Preference Sampling (HPS), a novel framework for robust and efficient human preference alignment. HPS introduces a training loss that prioritizes the most preferred response while rejecting all dispreferred and harmful ones. It emphasizes "hard" dispreferred responses -- those closely resembling preferred ones -- to enhance the model's rejection capabilities. By leveraging a single-sample Monte Carlo sampling strategy, HPS reduces computational overhead while maintaining alignment quality. Theoretically, HPS improves sample efficiency over existing PL methods and maximizes the reward margin between preferred and dispreferred responses, ensuring clearer distinctions. Experiments on HH-RLHF and PKU-Safety datasets validate HPS's effectiveness, achieving comparable BLEU and reward scores while greatly improving reward margins and thus reducing harmful content generation.
title HPS: Hard Preference Sampling for Human Preference Alignment
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.14400