Scalable Valuation of Human Feedback through Provably Robust Model Alignment

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Fujisawa, Masahiro, Adachi, Masaki, Osborne, Michael A.
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Fujisawa, Masahiro
Adachi, Masaki
Osborne, Michael A.
author_facet Fujisawa, Masahiro
Adachi, Masaki
Osborne, Michael A.
contents Despite the importance of aligning language models with human preferences, crowd-sourced human feedback is often noisy -- for example, preferring less desirable responses -- posing a fundamental challenge to alignment. A truly robust alignment objective should yield identical model parameters even under severe label noise, a property known as redescending. We prove that no existing alignment methods satisfy this property. To address this, we propose Hölder-DPO, the first principled alignment loss with a provable redescending property, enabling estimation of the clean data distribution from noisy feedback. The aligned model estimates the likelihood of clean data, providing a theoretically grounded metric for dataset valuation that identifies the location and fraction of mislabels. This metric is gradient-free, enabling scalable and automated human feedback valuation without costly manual verification or clean validation dataset. Hölder-DPO achieves state-of-the-art robust alignment performance while accurately detecting mislabels in controlled datasets. Finally, applied to Anthropic HH-RLHF dataset, it reveals substantial noise levels and removing these mislabels significantly improves alignment performance across methods. The code is available at https://github.com/ma921/HolderDPO.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_17859
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Scalable Valuation of Human Feedback through Provably Robust Model Alignment
Fujisawa, Masahiro
Adachi, Masaki
Osborne, Michael A.
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Despite the importance of aligning language models with human preferences, crowd-sourced human feedback is often noisy -- for example, preferring less desirable responses -- posing a fundamental challenge to alignment. A truly robust alignment objective should yield identical model parameters even under severe label noise, a property known as redescending. We prove that no existing alignment methods satisfy this property. To address this, we propose Hölder-DPO, the first principled alignment loss with a provable redescending property, enabling estimation of the clean data distribution from noisy feedback. The aligned model estimates the likelihood of clean data, providing a theoretically grounded metric for dataset valuation that identifies the location and fraction of mislabels. This metric is gradient-free, enabling scalable and automated human feedback valuation without costly manual verification or clean validation dataset. Hölder-DPO achieves state-of-the-art robust alignment performance while accurately detecting mislabels in controlled datasets. Finally, applied to Anthropic HH-RLHF dataset, it reveals substantial noise levels and removing these mislabels significantly improves alignment performance across methods. The code is available at https://github.com/ma921/HolderDPO.
title Scalable Valuation of Human Feedback through Provably Robust Model Alignment
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.17859