arXiv:2512.23067cs.AIcs.LG2025-12被引 3

发现现有奖励模型选型标准失效,提出新指标与基准测试生成行为一致性。

The Reward Model Selection Crisis in Personalized Alignment

  • 用政策准确率衡量生成引导能力,突破传统排名准确率局限。
  • 实测显示奖励模型准确率与生成效果相关性极弱(tau=0.08–0.31)。
  • 提出首个含用户真实完成项的个性化对齐基准,适合评估部署表现。

个性化对齐研究长期聚焦提升奖励模型(RM)的偏好排序准确性,隐含假设是更好排序即更好个性化行为。然而在实际部署中,受计算限制,需采用推理时调整如奖励引导解码(RGD),而非为每个用户微调策略。这带来关键但被忽视的要求:奖励模型不仅需准确排序偏好,还需有效引导生成。我们证明,标准的RM准确率在选择可部署个性化奖励时会灾难性失效。为此提出政策准确率——衡量经RGD调整的大模型能否正确区分偏好与不偏好回复,并发现上游RM准确率与下游政策准确率仅弱相关(肯德尔tau = 0.08–0.31)。更关键的是,我们引入Pref-LaMP——首个具备真实用户完成项的个性化对齐基准,实现行为直接评估。在该基准上,我们揭示判别排序与生成性能完全脱钩:20点的RM准确率差异导致输出质量几乎相同,高排序准确率方法仍无法生成行为一致回应。这些发现表明,领域长期优化的是无法预测部署表现的代理指标,现有个性化对齐方法在真实部署约束下无法将偏好转化为行为适应。相反,我们发现简单的上下文学习(ICL)极为有效——对≥3B参数模型显著优于所有奖励引导方法,在7B规模下较最优奖励方法提升约3点ROUGE-1。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Personalized alignment from preference data has focused primarily on improving personal reward model (RM) accuracy, with the implicit assumption that better preference ranking translates to better personalized behavior. However, in deployment, computational constraints necessitate inference-time adaptation such as reward-guided decoding (RGD) rather than per-user policy fine-tuning. This creates a critical but overlooked requirement: reward models must not only rank preferences accurately but also effectively guide generation. We demonstrate that standard RM accuracy fails catastrophically as a selection criterion for deployment-ready personalized rewards. We introduce policy accuracy; a metric quantifying whether RGD-adapted LLMs correctly discriminate between preferred and dispreferred responses and show that upstream RM accuracy correlates only weakly with downstream policy accuracy (Kendall's tau = 0.08--0.31). More critically, we introduce Pref-LaMP the first personalized alignment benchmark with ground-truth user completions, enabling direct behavioural evaluation. On Pref-LaMP, we expose a complete decoupling between discriminative ranking and generation metrics: methods with 20-point RM accuracy differences produce almost identical output quality, and methods with high ranking accuracy can fail to generate behaviorally aligned responses. These findings reveal that the field has been optimizing for proxy metrics that do not predict deployment performance, and that current personalized alignment methods fail to operationalize preferences into behavioral adaptation under realistic deployment constraints. In contrast, we find simple in-context learning (ICL) to be highly effective - dominating all reward-guided methods for models $\geq$3B parameters, achieving $\sim$3 point ROUGE-1 gains over the best reward method at 7B scale.

个性化对齐奖励模型生成评估

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