arXiv:2608.01556cs.LGcs.AI2026-08

用联邦学习提升大模型个性化评分,无需预先分组即可高效适配用户偏好。

Rethinking Personalized Reward Modeling for LLMs under Preference Heterogeneity via Group-Debiased Federated Learning

论文配图:Rethinking Personalized Reward Modeling for LLMs under Preference Heterogeneity via Group-Debiased Federated Learning
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 通过群体去偏的联邦学习,用统一初始化替代分组独立训练。
  • 仅需少量本地优化步骤,即超越按真实群体划分的独立模型。
  • 适合数据隐私敏感、用户偏好差异大的个性化应用开发。

大型语言模型通过奖励建模对齐人类偏好,但用户偏好数据敏感,难以集中处理。联邦学习在保持数据本地化的同时,学习共享的初始奖励模型,并通过本地微调实现个性化。由于用户常对相同回复给出相反标签,现有方法通过聚类相似客户端并为每组训练独立模型来应对偏好异质性,假设每组需独立初始化。我们发现该假设不必要:在偏好群体平衡时,单一的FedAvg模型即使初始准确率接近随机,经少量本地优化后仍优于为真实群体分别训练的模型。这归因于共享初始化的平坦性——跨客户端平均学习到更丰富的共享表征,在区分回复的同时抵消冲突偏好方向,使模型靠近决策边界,易于快速适应。但群体不平衡会破坏此效果,导致少数群体远离边界而无法恢复。为此,我们提出FedGD(群体去偏联邦学习),在联邦训练中发现潜在偏好群体,并通过群体去偏采样学习单一奖励模型。通过对抗群体不平衡的影响,FedGD获得高度可适应的初始化,实现无需先验知识的有效个性化。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Large language models are increasingly aligned to human preferences via reward modeling, but user preference data are sensitive and often cannot be centralized. Federated learning keeps such data local while learning a shared initial reward model, which is later personalized for each client through local fine-tuning. Because users often assign opposite labels to the same pair of responses, existing federated methods address preference heterogeneity by clustering similar clients and training one reward model per group, assuming that each group requires its own initialization. We show that this assumption is unnecessary. Under balanced preference groups, a single FedAvg model, despite starting at nearly random accuracy, surpasses reward models trained separately for each ground-truth group after only a few local optimization steps. We attribute this phenomenon to the flatness of the shared initialization: averaging across all clients learns richer shared representations that distinguish responses while canceling conflicting preference directions, leaving the model near a decision boundary that can be rapidly adapted. Group imbalance breaks this effect as the cancellation becomes asymmetric and leaves minority clients too far from the boundary to recover. Motivated by this observation, we propose FedGD (Federated Learning with Group Debiasing), which discovers latent preference groups during federated training and learns a single reward model using group-debiased client sampling. By counteracting the effect of group imbalance, FedGD learns an initialization that remains highly adaptable, enabling effective personalization without prior knowledge of the underlying groups.

联邦学习个性化奖励建模偏好异质

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