SPA: Achieving Consensus in LLM Alignment via Self-Priority Optimization

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Autori principali: Huang, Yue, Wang, Xiangqi, Zhang, Xiangliang
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Huang, Yue
Wang, Xiangqi
Zhang, Xiangliang
author_facet Huang, Yue
Wang, Xiangqi
Zhang, Xiangliang
contents In high-stakes scenarios-such as self-harm, legal, or medical queries-LLMs must be both trustworthy and helpful. However, these goals often conflict. We propose priority alignment, a new alignment paradigm that enforces a strict "trustworthy-before-helpful" ordering: optimization of helpfulness is conditioned on first meeting trustworthy thresholds (e.g., harmlessness or honesty). To realize this, we introduce Self-Priority Alignment (SPA)-a fully unsupervised framework that generates diverse responses, self-evaluates them and refines them by the model itself, and applies dual-criterion denoising to remove inconsistency and control variance. From this, SPA constructs lexicographically ordered preference pairs and fine-tunes the model using an uncertainty-weighted alignment loss that emphasizes high-confidence, high-gap decisions. Experiments across multiple benchmarks show that SPA improves helpfulness without compromising safety, outperforming strong baselines while preserving general capabilities. Our results demonstrate that SPA provides a scalable and interpretable alignment strategy for critical LLM applications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_06222
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SPA: Achieving Consensus in LLM Alignment via Self-Priority Optimization
Huang, Yue
Wang, Xiangqi
Zhang, Xiangliang
Computation and Language
Computers and Society
In high-stakes scenarios-such as self-harm, legal, or medical queries-LLMs must be both trustworthy and helpful. However, these goals often conflict. We propose priority alignment, a new alignment paradigm that enforces a strict "trustworthy-before-helpful" ordering: optimization of helpfulness is conditioned on first meeting trustworthy thresholds (e.g., harmlessness or honesty). To realize this, we introduce Self-Priority Alignment (SPA)-a fully unsupervised framework that generates diverse responses, self-evaluates them and refines them by the model itself, and applies dual-criterion denoising to remove inconsistency and control variance. From this, SPA constructs lexicographically ordered preference pairs and fine-tunes the model using an uncertainty-weighted alignment loss that emphasizes high-confidence, high-gap decisions. Experiments across multiple benchmarks show that SPA improves helpfulness without compromising safety, outperforming strong baselines while preserving general capabilities. Our results demonstrate that SPA provides a scalable and interpretable alignment strategy for critical LLM applications.
title SPA: Achieving Consensus in LLM Alignment via Self-Priority Optimization
topic Computation and Language
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.06222