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Active Preference Optimization for Sample Efficient RLHF

delete2026-01-01
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PRE
AI
N
Nirjhar Das *
S
Souradip Chakraborty
A
Aldo Pacchiano
S
Sayak Ray Chowdhury
DOI:10.1007/978-3-032-06096-9_6delete
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Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
Large Language Models (LLMs) aligned using Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) have shown remarkable generation abilities in numerous tasks. However, collecting high-quality human preferences creates costly bottlenecks in practical deployments, and hence, training data are often budgeted. In these scenarios, it is crucial to collect training data (e.g., contexts, a pair of generations for each context, and a preference indicating which generation is better) carefully, yet most of the existing methods sample contexts uniformly at random from a given collection. Given this, under the Bradley-Terry-Luce preference model and with a small budget of training data, we show that uniform sampling of contexts could lead to a policy (i.e., an aligned model) that suffers a constant sub-optimality gap from the optimal policy. This highlights the need for an adaptive context sampling strategy for effective alignment under a small sample budget. To address this, we reformulate RLHF within the contextual preference bandit framework, treating generations as actions, and give a nearly complete characterization of the sub-optimality gap in terms of both lower and upper bounds. First, when the action set is a d-dimensional hypercube and the number of samples is T, we show an Omega(d/root T) lower bound. Next, we propose an algorithm, Active Preference Optimization (APO), that iteratively collects preferences for the most uncertain contexts. We show that the sub-optimality gap of the policy learned via APO matches the lower bound up to a log factor and a non-linearity constant. Finally, we perform experiments on practical datasets to validate APO's efficacy over existing methods, establishing it as a sample-efficient and cost-effective solution for LLM alignment.

Journal

M
MACHINE LEARNING AND KNOWLEDGE DISCOVERY IN DATABASES. RESEARCH TRACK, ECML PKDD 2025, PT V
IF:
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Papers:
26
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B
boston university
Scholars:
3.8W
Papers: 3.2W
Citations: 67
U
university of maryland college park
Scholars:
545
Papers: 344
Citations: 0
I
indian institute of science (iisc) - bangalore
Scholars:
1.4W
Papers: 1.4W
Citations: 11
University System of Maryland cover
University System of Maryland
Scholars:
6.5W
Papers: 5.6W
Citations: 113
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Cited Papers

Cited Papers

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