Larger or Smaller Reward Margins to Select Preferences for Alignment?

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Huang, Kexin, Wu, Junkang, Chen, Ziqian, Wang, Xue, Gao, Jinyang, Ding, Bolin, Wu, Jiancan, He, Xiangnan, Wang, Xiang
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Huang, Kexin
Wu, Junkang
Chen, Ziqian
Wang, Xue
Gao, Jinyang
Ding, Bolin
Wu, Jiancan
He, Xiangnan
Wang, Xiang
author_facet Huang, Kexin
Wu, Junkang
Chen, Ziqian
Wang, Xue
Gao, Jinyang
Ding, Bolin
Wu, Jiancan
He, Xiangnan
Wang, Xiang
contents Preference learning is critical for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values, with the quality of preference datasets playing a crucial role in this process. While existing metrics primarily assess data quality based on either explicit or implicit reward margins, they often provide contradictory evaluations for the same data. To address this issue, we introduce the alignment potential metric, which quantifies the gap from the model's current implicit reward margin to the target explicit reward margin, thereby estimating the model's potential to align with the preference data. Empirical results demonstrate that training on data selected by this metric consistently enhances alignment performance, surpassing existing metrics across different base models and optimization objectives. Furthermore, our method extends to self-play data generation frameworks, where the metric is used to identify high-quality data within the self-generated content by LLMs. Under this data generation scenario, our method surpasses current state-of-the-art (SOTA) results across various training settings and demonstrates continuous improvements in alignment performance as dataset size and training iterations increase.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_01864
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Larger or Smaller Reward Margins to Select Preferences for Alignment?
Huang, Kexin
Wu, Junkang
Chen, Ziqian
Wang, Xue
Gao, Jinyang
Ding, Bolin
Wu, Jiancan
He, Xiangnan
Wang, Xiang
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Preference learning is critical for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values, with the quality of preference datasets playing a crucial role in this process. While existing metrics primarily assess data quality based on either explicit or implicit reward margins, they often provide contradictory evaluations for the same data. To address this issue, we introduce the alignment potential metric, which quantifies the gap from the model's current implicit reward margin to the target explicit reward margin, thereby estimating the model's potential to align with the preference data. Empirical results demonstrate that training on data selected by this metric consistently enhances alignment performance, surpassing existing metrics across different base models and optimization objectives. Furthermore, our method extends to self-play data generation frameworks, where the metric is used to identify high-quality data within the self-generated content by LLMs. Under this data generation scenario, our method surpasses current state-of-the-art (SOTA) results across various training settings and demonstrates continuous improvements in alignment performance as dataset size and training iterations increase.
title Larger or Smaller Reward Margins to Select Preferences for Alignment?
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.01864