Hongyan Xue


2025

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Gradient-Adaptive Policy Optimization: Towards Multi-Objective Alignment of Large Language Models
Chengao Li | Hanyu Zhang | Yunkun Xu | Hongyan Xue | Xiang Ao | Qing He
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a powerful technique for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, effectively aligning LLMs with diverse human preferences remains a significant challenge, particularly when they are conflict. To address this issue, we frame human value alignment as a multi-objective optimization problem, aiming to maximize a set of potentially conflicting objectives. We introduce Gradient-Adaptive Policy Optimization (GAPO), a novel fine-tuning paradigm that employs multiple-gradient descent to align LLMs with diverse preference distributions. GAPO adaptively rescales the gradients for each objective to determine an update direction that optimally balances the trade-offs between objectives. Additionally, we introduce P-GAPO, which incorporates user preferences across different objectives and achieves Pareto solutions that better align with the user’s specific needs.