Learning Ordinal Probabilistic Reward from Preferences
Reward models are crucial for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values and intentions. Existing approaches follow either Generative (GRMs) or Discriminative (DRMs) paradigms, yet both suffer from limitations: GRMs typically demand costly point-wise supervision, while DRMs produce uncalibrated relative scores that lack probabilistic interpretation. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel reward modeling paradigm: Probabilistic Reward Model (PRM). Instead of modeling reward as a deterministic scalar, our approach treats it as a random variable, learning a full probability distribution for the quality of each response. To make this paradigm practical, we present its closed-form, discrete realization: the Ordinal Probabilistic Reward Model (OPRM), which discretizes the quality score into a finite set of ordinal ratings. Building on OPRM, we propose a data-efficient training strategy called Region Flooding Tuning (RgFT). It enables rewards to better reflect absolute text quality by incorporating quality-level annotations, which guide the model to concentrate the probability mass within corresponding rating sub-regions. Experiments on various reward model benchmarks show that our method improves accuracy by $\textbf{2.9%}\sim\textbf{7.4%}$ compared to prior reward models, demonstrating strong performance and data efficiency. Analysis of the score distribution provides evidence that our method captures not only relative rankings but also absolute quality.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Beyond Binary Preferences: A Principled Framework for Reward Modeling with Ordinal Feedback
Reward modeling is crucial for aligning large language models with human preferences, yet current approaches lack a principled mathematical framework for leveraging ordinal preference data. When human annotators provide …
The Vigilant Eating Rule: A General Approach for Probabilistic Economic Design with Constraints
We consider the problem of probabilistic allocation of objects under ordinal preferences. We devise an allocation mechanism, called the vigilant eating rule (VER), that applies to nearly arbitrary feasibility constraints…
Ordinal Graph Gamma Belief Network for Social Recommender Systems
To build recommender systems that not only consider user-item interactions represented as ordinal variables, but also exploit the social network describing the relationships between the users, we develop a hierarchical B…
Recommendation SystemsOrdinal Preference Optimization: Aligning Human Preferences via NDCG
Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with diverse human preferences is a pivotal technique for controlling model behaviors and enhancing generation quality. Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), Direct Pref…
Information RetrievalThe Probabilistic Serial and Random Priority Mechanisms with Minimum Quotas
Consider the problem of assigning indivisible objects to agents with strict ordinal preferences over objects, where each agent is interested in consuming at most one object, and objects have integer minimum and maximum q…