Objective-Conditioned Active Preference Learning for Multi-Objective Alignment

Computer Science > Machine Learning

[Submitted on 3 Nov 2026]

Title:Objective-Conditioned Active Preference Learning for Multi-Objective Alignment

View PDF HTML (experimental)Abstract:Aligning large language models (LLMs) with several objectives, such as helpfulness, harmlessness, and honesty, typically relies on preference judgment for each objective, growing the annotation cost linearly with the number of objectives. Active preference learning can reduce this cost by selecting the comparisons whose labels are expected to change the policy most. Existing remedies either lack an objective-aware query selection mechanism for the multi-objective setting or regard conflicting preferences as harmful, therefore excluding them from the training data. We introduce OGC-DPO (Objective-conditioned Gradient Coverage DPO), an active learning framework that treats each (response pair, objective) combination as a separate query and measures its informativeness through the policy's own implicit gradient, without relying on an external reward model. OGC-DPO then selects the queries that most expand each objective's gradient coverage. Empirical experiments across varying numbers of objectives demonstrate the effectiveness of OGC-DPO over existing active preference learning methods under the same annotation cost. Further analysis demonstrates that informative conflicts, rather than being uniformly harmful, provide a useful policy training signal.

Additional Features

References & Citations

Loading...

Bibliographic and Citation Tools

Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?)

Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?)

Litmaps (What is Litmaps?)

scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?)

Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article

alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?)

CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?)

DagsHub (What is DagsHub?)

Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?)

Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?)

ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?)

Demos

Recommenders and Search Tools

Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?)

CORE Recommender (What is CORE?)

IArxiv Recommender

(What is IArxiv?)

arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.