PIRA: Preference-Oriented Instruction-Tuned Reward Models with Dual Aggregation (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to align large language models with human preferences are limited by their large-scale annotation and prone to reward overoptimization. |
| Approach: | They propose a training paradigm that integrates three complementary strategies to address these challenges by reformulating question–answer pairs into preference-task instructions, averaging the rewards aggregated from diverse preference- task instructions for each sample, and a balancing outputs from the value head under different dropout rates. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on public datasets show that PIRA improves performance considerably, enhances generalization, and effectively mitigates reward overoptimization. |
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