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Unbiased Alignment for Large Language Models with Noisy Preferences

About

The alignment of large language models with human preferences is commonly achieved through Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback or Direct Preference Optimization. However, these methods are vulnerable to the significant noise prevalent in real-world preference datasets. To address this critical issue, we present a theoretical framework for unbiased alignment, introducing the Unbiased Reward Model (URM) loss and the Unbiased Direct Preference Optimization (UDPO) loss. By mathematically correcting the distortion induced by preference noise, our novel objectives enable unbiased model training directly from noisy datasets, without requiring clean ground-truth supervision. We provide rigorous theoretical analyses demonstrating that our methods are noise-tolerant, parameter downward compatible, and classification-calibrated. Comprehensive experiments across diverse datasets demonstrate that our approaches outperform state-of-the-art baselines. Code available at: https://github.com/cswjl/unbiased-alignment.

Jialiang Wang, Xianming Liu, Xiong Zhou, Hui Liu, Haoliang Li• 2026

Related benchmarks

TaskDatasetResultRank
Preference AlignmentUFB
Win Rate74.3
32
Dialogue Preference LearningHH (test)
Win Rate (0% Flip)90.8
14
Summarization Preference LearningTL;DR (test)
Win Rate (0% Flip)87.2
14
DialogueHH (Anthropic Helpful and Harmless)
Win Rate (0% Flip)82.5
10
Reward Model LearningUFB
Win Rate72.5
10
SummarizationTL;DR
Win Rate (0% Flip Rate)83.4
10
AlignmentHH (IDN 20%)
Win Rate78.2
8
AlignmentHH IDN 40%
Win Rate68
8
Closed Loop RLHFHH 0% noise
Win Rate61.6
3
Closed Loop RLHFHH 20% noise
Win Rate58.7
3
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