DRIFT: Learning from Abundant User Dissatisfaction in Real-World Preference Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wang, Yifan, Li, Bolian, Wu, Junlin, Tan, Zhaoxuan, Liu, Zheli, Zhang, Ruqi, Grama, Ananth, Zeng, Qingkai
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Wang, Yifan
Li, Bolian
Wu, Junlin
Tan, Zhaoxuan
Liu, Zheli
Zhang, Ruqi
Grama, Ananth
Zeng, Qingkai
author_facet Wang, Yifan
Li, Bolian
Wu, Junlin
Tan, Zhaoxuan
Liu, Zheli
Zhang, Ruqi
Grama, Ananth
Zeng, Qingkai
contents Real-world large language model deployments (e.g., conversational AI systems, code generation assistants) naturally generate abundant implicit user dissatisfaction (DSAT) signals, as users iterate toward better answers through refinements, corrections, and expressed preferences, while explicit satisfaction (SAT) feedback is scarce. Existing preference learning approaches are poorly aligned with this data profile, as they rely on costly human annotations or assume plentiful positive responses. In this paper, we introduce \textbf{DRIFT} (\textbf{D}issatisfaction-\textbf{R}efined \textbf{I}terative pre\textbf{F}erence \textbf{T}raining), which anchors training on real-world DSAT signals and samples positives dynamically from the evolving policy. Empirically, DRIFT models trained on real-world \textit{WildFeedback} datasets and synthetic \textit{UltraFeedback} datasets achieve up to +6.23\% (7B) / +7.61\% (14B) on WildBench Task Score and up to +8.95\% (7B) / +12.29\% (14B) on AlpacaEval2 win rate over base models, outperforming strong baseline methods such as iterative DPO and SPIN. At larger scales, the improvements are particularly pronounced: 14B models trained with DRIFT surpass GPT-4o-mini on WildBench. Further analysis shows that DRIFT also preserves exploratory capacity, yielding more diverse high-reward solutions rather than collapsing to narrow subsets. Theoretically, we demonstrate that this design preserves preference margins and avoids the gradient degeneration. These results show that DRIFT is an effective and scalable recipe for real-world post-training that leverages the most abundant and informative signal. The code and data are available at https://github.com/cacayaya/DRIFT.git.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_02341
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DRIFT: Learning from Abundant User Dissatisfaction in Real-World Preference Learning
Wang, Yifan
Li, Bolian
Wu, Junlin
Tan, Zhaoxuan
Liu, Zheli
Zhang, Ruqi
Grama, Ananth
Zeng, Qingkai
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Real-world large language model deployments (e.g., conversational AI systems, code generation assistants) naturally generate abundant implicit user dissatisfaction (DSAT) signals, as users iterate toward better answers through refinements, corrections, and expressed preferences, while explicit satisfaction (SAT) feedback is scarce. Existing preference learning approaches are poorly aligned with this data profile, as they rely on costly human annotations or assume plentiful positive responses. In this paper, we introduce \textbf{DRIFT} (\textbf{D}issatisfaction-\textbf{R}efined \textbf{I}terative pre\textbf{F}erence \textbf{T}raining), which anchors training on real-world DSAT signals and samples positives dynamically from the evolving policy. Empirically, DRIFT models trained on real-world \textit{WildFeedback} datasets and synthetic \textit{UltraFeedback} datasets achieve up to +6.23\% (7B) / +7.61\% (14B) on WildBench Task Score and up to +8.95\% (7B) / +12.29\% (14B) on AlpacaEval2 win rate over base models, outperforming strong baseline methods such as iterative DPO and SPIN. At larger scales, the improvements are particularly pronounced: 14B models trained with DRIFT surpass GPT-4o-mini on WildBench. Further analysis shows that DRIFT also preserves exploratory capacity, yielding more diverse high-reward solutions rather than collapsing to narrow subsets. Theoretically, we demonstrate that this design preserves preference margins and avoids the gradient degeneration. These results show that DRIFT is an effective and scalable recipe for real-world post-training that leverages the most abundant and informative signal. The code and data are available at https://github.com/cacayaya/DRIFT.git.
title DRIFT: Learning from Abundant User Dissatisfaction in Real-World Preference Learning
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02341