Multi-Objective Preference Optimization: Improving Human Alignment of Generative Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Agnihotri, Akhil, Jain, Rahul, Ramachandran, Deepak, Wen, Zheng
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Agnihotri, Akhil
Jain, Rahul
Ramachandran, Deepak
Wen, Zheng
author_facet Agnihotri, Akhil
Jain, Rahul
Ramachandran, Deepak
Wen, Zheng
contents Post-training of LLMs with RLHF, and subsequently preference optimization algorithms such as DPO, IPO, etc., made a big difference in improving human alignment. However, all such techniques can only work with a single (human) objective. In practice, human users have multiple objectives, such as helpfulness and harmlessness, and there is no natural way to aggregate them into a single objective. In this paper, we address the multi-objective preference-alignment problem, where a policy must optimize several, potentially conflicting, objectives. We introduce the Multi-Objective Preference Optimization (MOPO) algorithm, which frames alignment as a constrained KL-regularized optimization: the primary objective is maximized while secondary objectives are lower-bounded by tunable safety thresholds. Unlike prior work, MOPO operates directly on pairwise preference data, requires no point-wise reward assumption, and avoids heuristic prompt-context engineering. The method recovers policies on the Pareto front whenever the front is attainable; practically, it reduces to simple closed-form iterative updates suitable for large-scale training. On synthetic benchmarks with diverse canonical preference structures, we show that MOPO approximates the Pareto front. When fine-tuning a 1.3B-parameter language model on real-world human-preference datasets, MOPO attains higher rewards and yields policies that Pareto-dominate baselines; ablation studies confirm optimization stability and robustness to hyperparameters.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_10892
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Multi-Objective Preference Optimization: Improving Human Alignment of Generative Models
Agnihotri, Akhil
Jain, Rahul
Ramachandran, Deepak
Wen, Zheng
Machine Learning
Post-training of LLMs with RLHF, and subsequently preference optimization algorithms such as DPO, IPO, etc., made a big difference in improving human alignment. However, all such techniques can only work with a single (human) objective. In practice, human users have multiple objectives, such as helpfulness and harmlessness, and there is no natural way to aggregate them into a single objective. In this paper, we address the multi-objective preference-alignment problem, where a policy must optimize several, potentially conflicting, objectives. We introduce the Multi-Objective Preference Optimization (MOPO) algorithm, which frames alignment as a constrained KL-regularized optimization: the primary objective is maximized while secondary objectives are lower-bounded by tunable safety thresholds. Unlike prior work, MOPO operates directly on pairwise preference data, requires no point-wise reward assumption, and avoids heuristic prompt-context engineering. The method recovers policies on the Pareto front whenever the front is attainable; practically, it reduces to simple closed-form iterative updates suitable for large-scale training. On synthetic benchmarks with diverse canonical preference structures, we show that MOPO approximates the Pareto front. When fine-tuning a 1.3B-parameter language model on real-world human-preference datasets, MOPO attains higher rewards and yields policies that Pareto-dominate baselines; ablation studies confirm optimization stability and robustness to hyperparameters.
title Multi-Objective Preference Optimization: Improving Human Alignment of Generative Models
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.10892