Improving LLM General Preference Alignment via Optimistic Online Mirror Descent

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Zhang, Yuheng, Yu, Dian, Ge, Tao, Song, Linfeng, Zeng, Zhichen, Mi, Haitao, Jiang, Nan, Yu, Dong
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Zhang, Yuheng
Yu, Dian
Ge, Tao
Song, Linfeng
Zeng, Zhichen
Mi, Haitao
Jiang, Nan
Yu, Dong
author_facet Zhang, Yuheng
Yu, Dian
Ge, Tao
Song, Linfeng
Zeng, Zhichen
Mi, Haitao
Jiang, Nan
Yu, Dong
contents Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. Many existing alignment approaches rely on the Bradley-Terry (BT) model assumption, which assumes the existence of a ground-truth reward for each prompt-response pair. However, this assumption can be overly restrictive when modeling complex human preferences. In this paper, we drop the BT model assumption and study LLM alignment under general preferences, formulated as a two-player game. Drawing on theoretical insights from learning in games, we integrate optimistic online mirror descent into our alignment framework to approximate the Nash policy. Theoretically, we demonstrate that our approach achieves an $O(T^{-1})$ bound on the duality gap, improving upon the previous $O(T^{-1/2})$ result. More importantly, we implement our method and show through experiments that it outperforms state-of-the-art RLHF algorithms across multiple representative benchmarks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_16852
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Improving LLM General Preference Alignment via Optimistic Online Mirror Descent
Zhang, Yuheng
Yu, Dian
Ge, Tao
Song, Linfeng
Zeng, Zhichen
Mi, Haitao
Jiang, Nan
Yu, Dong
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. Many existing alignment approaches rely on the Bradley-Terry (BT) model assumption, which assumes the existence of a ground-truth reward for each prompt-response pair. However, this assumption can be overly restrictive when modeling complex human preferences. In this paper, we drop the BT model assumption and study LLM alignment under general preferences, formulated as a two-player game. Drawing on theoretical insights from learning in games, we integrate optimistic online mirror descent into our alignment framework to approximate the Nash policy. Theoretically, we demonstrate that our approach achieves an $O(T^{-1})$ bound on the duality gap, improving upon the previous $O(T^{-1/2})$ result. More importantly, we implement our method and show through experiments that it outperforms state-of-the-art RLHF algorithms across multiple representative benchmarks.
title Improving LLM General Preference Alignment via Optimistic Online Mirror Descent
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.16852