arXiv:2606.19607cs.AIstat.AP2026-06

优化大模型对齐训练中最有价值的文本对比对,提升标注效率。

Which Pairs to Compare for LLM Post-Training?

论文配图:Which Pairs to Compare for LLM Post-Training?
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 将对比对选择建模为采样设计问题,基于信息矩阵优化标注分配。
  • 理论证明对比对选择直接影响最终模型性能,存在最优与最差边界。
  • 实验证明新方法在少量标注下显著优于常见启发式策略,适合资源受限场景。

基于偏好对的大模型后训练已成为语言模型对齐的核心范式。当前常用策略是为每个提示生成少量完成内容,并标注其比较对。然而,人类偏好标签成本远高于生成更多完成内容,提示应更高效利用标注预算:生成更大规模的完成池,但仅标注最具信息量的对比对。本文研究了偏好对齐训练中应选择哪些对比对进行标注。我们将对比对筛选建模为采样设计问题,以偏好训练后的最终策略质量为评估标准。以直接偏好优化(DPO)为例,分析对比对选择如何通过训练过程影响下游策略表现。主要结果给出了DPO训练后策略次优性的上下界,表明对比对选择通过一个依赖设计的信息矩阵影响参数估计误差与策略次优性。由此得到预算约束下的显式优化准则,并指导从大规模生成完成池中选取高信息量对比对的实际采样策略。在合成数据和语言模型后训练基准上的实验表明,所提方法在样本效率上持续优于常见对比对选择启发式方法。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Preference-based post-training has become a central paradigm for aligning language models. A common data-collection strategy is to generate a small set of completions for each prompt and label the resulting comparison pairs. However, human preference labels are often much more expensive than generating additional completions, suggesting a different use of the same labeling budget: generate a larger pool of completions, but label only the most informative comparison pairs. This paper studies which pairs should be compared in preference-based post-training. We formulate comparison curation as a sampling-design problem and evaluate designs by the quality of the final policy under the preference-based post-training objective. We instantiate this framework for Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), analyzing how the choice of labeled pairs propagates through DPO training to downstream policy performance. Our main results provide matching upper and lower bounds on the post-training optimality gap of the DPO-trained policy. The bounds show that comparison selection affects downstream performance through a single design-dependent information matrix, which links label allocation to parameter estimation error and policy suboptimality. This yields an explicit optimization criterion for budgeted comparison curation and motivates practical sampling designs for selecting informative pairs from large generated completion pools. Experiments on synthetic settings and language-model post-training benchmarks show that the proposed designs consistently improve sample efficiency over common comparison-selection heuristics.

大模型对齐偏好学习样本效率信息矩阵

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