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LiPO: Listwise Preference Optimization through Learning-to-Rank

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arxiv 2402.01878 v3 pith:POHXFJNM submitted 2024-02-02 cs.CL cs.LG

LiPO: Listwise Preference Optimization through Learning-to-Rank

classification cs.CL cs.LG
keywords preferencefeedbacklistrankingresponsesalignmenthumanlistwise
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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abstract

Aligning language models (LMs) with curated human feedback is critical to control their behaviors in real-world applications. Several recent policy optimization methods, such as DPO and SLiC, serve as promising alternatives to the traditional Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) approach. In practice, human feedback often comes in a format of a ranked list over multiple responses to amortize the cost of reading prompt. Multiple responses can also be ranked by reward models or AI feedback. There lacks such a thorough study on directly fitting upon a list of responses. In this work, we formulate the LM alignment as a \textit{listwise} ranking problem and describe the LiPO framework, where the policy can potentially learn more effectively from a ranked list of plausible responses given the prompt. This view draws an explicit connection to Learning-to-Rank (LTR), where most existing preference optimization work can be mapped to existing ranking objectives. Following this connection, we provide an examination of ranking objectives that are not well studied for LM alignment with DPO and SLiC as special cases when list size is two. In particular, we highlight a specific method, LiPO-$\lambda$, which leverages a state-of-the-art \textit{listwise} ranking objective and weights each preference pair in a more advanced manner. We show that LiPO-$\lambda$ can outperform DPO variants and SLiC by a clear margin on several preference alignment tasks with both curated and real rankwise preference data.

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Cited by 8 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

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  2. Multi-Turn On-Policy Distillation with Prefix Replay

    cs.LG 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    ReOPD offline-distills multi-turn agentic LLMs via teacher-prefix replay plus step-decay sampling, matching online OPD accuracy at ≥4× speed with zero tool calls.

  3. Response Time Enhances Alignment with Heterogeneous Preferences

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    Response times modeled as drift-diffusion processes enable consistent estimation of population-average preferences from heterogeneous anonymous binary choices.

  4. Threshold-Guided Optimization for Visual Generative Models

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    A threshold-guided alignment method lets visual generative models be optimized directly from scalar human ratings instead of requiring paired preference data.

  5. The Differences Between Direct Alignment Algorithms are a Blur

    cs.LG 2025-02 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    A controlled unification of direct alignment algorithms shows the ranking objective (pairwise vs pointwise) drives alignment quality more than the scalar score optimized.

  6. UNA: A Unified Supervised Framework for Efficient LLM Alignment Across Feedback Types

    cs.LG 2024-08 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    UNA unifies binary, pairwise, and score-based feedback for LLM alignment via a generalized implicit reward function shown optimal by the log sum inequality.

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    cs.LG 2026-07 conditional novelty 5.0

    By replaying teacher prefixes with a step-decay schedule, multi-turn on-policy distillation can run without live environment interaction, matching or slightly beating online OPD accuracy.

  8. HAEPO: History-Aggregated Exploratory Policy Optimization

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