Wei Ye

Yidong Wang, Xin Wang, Cunxiang Wang et al.

Self-Rewarding Language Models propose an architecture in which the Large Language Models(LLMs) both generates responses and evaluates its own outputs via LLM-as-a-Judge prompting, dynamically improving its generative capabilities through iterative Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). However, our analysis reveals a critical limitation in existing Self-Rewarding paradigms: the synchronized improvement of chosen and rejected responses progressively narrows the representational difference between contrasting samples, undermining effective preference learning. We propose \textbf{Temporal Self-Rewarding Language Models} that strategically coordinate past, present, and future model generations to sustain learning signals. Our dual-phase framework introduces: (1) \textit{Anchored Rejection} - fixing rejected responses using the past initial model's outputs and (2) \textit{Future-Guided Chosen} - dynamically curating chosen samples using next-generation model predictions. Extensive experiments across three model families (Llama, Qwen, Mistral) and different model sizes (Llama3B/8B/70B) demonstrate significant improvements when trained with our method compared to Self-Rewarding using same computation resources. For example, Llama3.1-8B reaches a 29.44 win rate on AlpacaEval 2.0 with our method, outperforming the Self-Rewarding baseline (19.69) by 9.75. Notably, our method also demonstrates superior out-of-distribution generalization across mathematical reasoning (GSM8K), knowledge-based QA (ARC, TruthfulQA), and code generation (HumanEval) tasks, even though we do not specifically collect such training data.

Yutao Mou, Xiaoling Zhou, Yuxiao Luo et al.

Safety alignment is essential for building trustworthy artificial intelligence, yet it remains challenging to enhance model safety without degrading general performance. Current approaches require computationally expensive searches for the optimal proportion of safety-critical and general-purpose data to balance safety and general performance, incurring high costs with limited gains. In this work, we show that LoRA-based Refusal-training enables performance-preserving safety alignment even when trained solely on safety data, demonstrating that LoRA serves as cost-efficient, performance-preserving, and plug-and-play safety patches. Beyond empirical findings, we provide both theoretical and experimental evidence that LoRA effectively decouples safety into a low-rank subspace largely orthogonal to the model's intrinsic transformation space, ensuring that safety enhancements do not interfere with inherent capabilities.