Clean First, Align Later: Benchmarking Preference Data Cleaning for Reliable LLM Alignment

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Yeh, Samuel, Li, Sharon
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Yeh, Samuel
Li, Sharon
author_facet Yeh, Samuel
Li, Sharon
contents Human feedback plays a pivotal role in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, such feedback is often noisy or inconsistent, which can degrade the quality of reward models and hinder alignment. While various automated data cleaning methods have been proposed to mitigate this issue, a systematic evaluation of their effectiveness and generalizability remains lacking. To bridge this gap, we introduce the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating 13 preference data cleaning methods in the context of LLM alignment. PrefCleanBench offers a standardized protocol to assess cleaning strategies in terms of alignment performance and generalizability across diverse datasets, model architectures, and optimization algorithms. By unifying disparate methods and rigorously comparing them, we uncover key factors that determine the success of data cleaning in alignment tasks. This benchmark lays the groundwork for principled and reproducible approaches to improving LLM alignment through better data quality-highlighting the crucial but underexplored role of data preprocessing in responsible AI development. We release modular implementations of all methods to catalyze further research: https://github.com/deeplearning-wisc/PrefCleanBench.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_23564
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Clean First, Align Later: Benchmarking Preference Data Cleaning for Reliable LLM Alignment
Yeh, Samuel
Li, Sharon
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Human feedback plays a pivotal role in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, such feedback is often noisy or inconsistent, which can degrade the quality of reward models and hinder alignment. While various automated data cleaning methods have been proposed to mitigate this issue, a systematic evaluation of their effectiveness and generalizability remains lacking. To bridge this gap, we introduce the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating 13 preference data cleaning methods in the context of LLM alignment. PrefCleanBench offers a standardized protocol to assess cleaning strategies in terms of alignment performance and generalizability across diverse datasets, model architectures, and optimization algorithms. By unifying disparate methods and rigorously comparing them, we uncover key factors that determine the success of data cleaning in alignment tasks. This benchmark lays the groundwork for principled and reproducible approaches to improving LLM alignment through better data quality-highlighting the crucial but underexplored role of data preprocessing in responsible AI development. We release modular implementations of all methods to catalyze further research: https://github.com/deeplearning-wisc/PrefCleanBench.
title Clean First, Align Later: Benchmarking Preference Data Cleaning for Reliable LLM Alignment
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23564