APPA: Adaptive Preference Pluralistic Alignment for Fair Federated RLHF of LLMs

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Srewa, Mahmoud, Zhao, Tianyu, Elmalaki, Salma
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Srewa, Mahmoud
Zhao, Tianyu
Elmalaki, Salma
author_facet Srewa, Mahmoud
Zhao, Tianyu
Elmalaki, Salma
contents Aligning large language models (LLMs) with diverse human preferences requires pluralistic alignment, where a single model must respect the values of multiple distinct groups simultaneously. In federated reinforcement learning from human feedback (FedRLHF), these groups align a shared policy without centralizing preference data, which makes fair reward aggregation essential. Existing aggregation methods exhibit clear trade offs: average based aggregation systematically under aligns worst performing groups, while min aggregation prioritizes worst group performance at the cost of overall alignment. We propose APPA, an Adaptive Preference Pluralistic Alignment framework that dynamically reweights group level rewards based on historical alignment rewards. Our approach prioritizes under aligned groups without degrading well aligned ones, while requiring no access to raw preference data. Integrated into a proximal policy optimization (PPO) based FedRLHF pipeline and evaluated on GLOBALQA and OQA across three model families (Gemma 2 2B, Llama 3.2 3B, Qwen3 0.6B), APPA achieves strong fairness alignment trade offs, improving worst group alignment by up to 28% over average aggregation while maintaining higher overall alignment than min aggregation across most configurations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_04261
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle APPA: Adaptive Preference Pluralistic Alignment for Fair Federated RLHF of LLMs
Srewa, Mahmoud
Zhao, Tianyu
Elmalaki, Salma
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Aligning large language models (LLMs) with diverse human preferences requires pluralistic alignment, where a single model must respect the values of multiple distinct groups simultaneously. In federated reinforcement learning from human feedback (FedRLHF), these groups align a shared policy without centralizing preference data, which makes fair reward aggregation essential. Existing aggregation methods exhibit clear trade offs: average based aggregation systematically under aligns worst performing groups, while min aggregation prioritizes worst group performance at the cost of overall alignment. We propose APPA, an Adaptive Preference Pluralistic Alignment framework that dynamically reweights group level rewards based on historical alignment rewards. Our approach prioritizes under aligned groups without degrading well aligned ones, while requiring no access to raw preference data. Integrated into a proximal policy optimization (PPO) based FedRLHF pipeline and evaluated on GLOBALQA and OQA across three model families (Gemma 2 2B, Llama 3.2 3B, Qwen3 0.6B), APPA achieves strong fairness alignment trade offs, improving worst group alignment by up to 28% over average aggregation while maintaining higher overall alignment than min aggregation across most configurations.
title APPA: Adaptive Preference Pluralistic Alignment for Fair Federated RLHF of LLMs
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04261