Tony Quek


2025

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DiffPO: Diffusion-styled Preference Optimization for Inference Time Alignment of Large Language Models
Ruizhe Chen | Wenhao Chai | Zhifei Yang | Xiaotian Zhang | Ziyang Wang | Tony Quek | Joey Tianyi Zhou | Soujanya Poria | Zuozhu Liu
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Inference-time alignment provides an efficient alternative for aligning LLMs with humans. However, these approaches still face challenges, such as limited scalability due to policy-specific value functions and latency during the inference phase. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, Diffusion-styled Preference Optimization (DiffPO), which provides an efficient and policy-agnostic solution for aligning LLMs with humans. By directly performing alignment at sentence level, DiffPO avoids the time latency associated with token-level generation. Designed as a plug-and-play module, DiffPO can be seamlessly integrated with various base models to enhance their alignment. Extensive experiments on AlpacaEval 2, MT-bench, and HH-RLHF demonstrate that DiffPO achieves superior alignment performance across various settings, achieving a favorable trade-off between alignment quality and inference-time latency. Furthermore, DiffPO demonstrates model-agnostic scalability, significantly improving the performance of large models such as Llama-3-70B.