Debiasing Online Preference Learning via Preference Feature Preservation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Kim, Dongyoung, Yoon, Jinsung, Shin, Jinwoo, Kim, Jaehyung
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Kim, Dongyoung
Yoon, Jinsung
Shin, Jinwoo
Kim, Jaehyung
author_facet Kim, Dongyoung
Yoon, Jinsung
Shin, Jinwoo
Kim, Jaehyung
contents Recent preference learning frameworks for large language models (LLMs) simplify human preferences with binary pairwise comparisons and scalar rewards. This simplification could make LLMs' responses biased to mostly preferred features, and would be exacerbated during the iterations of online preference learning steps. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework coined PFP (Preference Feature Preservation). The key idea of PFP is maintaining the distribution of human preference features and utilizing such rich signals throughout the online preference learning process. Specifically, PFP first extract preference features from offline pairwise human preference data and trains a feature classifier. Then, using trained classifier and the distribution preserving optimization, PFP maps appropriate preference features for a new input instruction during online learning. Lastly, PFP trains LLM using the existing preference learning method, by incorporating the preference feature into system prompts and enabling LLM to explicitly handle various human preferences. Our experiments demonstrate that PFP successfully mitigates the bias in preference features during online learning, and hence achieves superior performance compared to previous preference learning methods on standard benchmarks to evaluate LLM alignment.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_11098
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Debiasing Online Preference Learning via Preference Feature Preservation
Kim, Dongyoung
Yoon, Jinsung
Shin, Jinwoo
Kim, Jaehyung
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Recent preference learning frameworks for large language models (LLMs) simplify human preferences with binary pairwise comparisons and scalar rewards. This simplification could make LLMs' responses biased to mostly preferred features, and would be exacerbated during the iterations of online preference learning steps. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework coined PFP (Preference Feature Preservation). The key idea of PFP is maintaining the distribution of human preference features and utilizing such rich signals throughout the online preference learning process. Specifically, PFP first extract preference features from offline pairwise human preference data and trains a feature classifier. Then, using trained classifier and the distribution preserving optimization, PFP maps appropriate preference features for a new input instruction during online learning. Lastly, PFP trains LLM using the existing preference learning method, by incorporating the preference feature into system prompts and enabling LLM to explicitly handle various human preferences. Our experiments demonstrate that PFP successfully mitigates the bias in preference features during online learning, and hence achieves superior performance compared to previous preference learning methods on standard benchmarks to evaluate LLM alignment.
title Debiasing Online Preference Learning via Preference Feature Preservation
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11098