Beyond Uniform Forgetting: A Study of Sequential Direct Preference Optimization Across Preference Settings
Aligning language models with human preferences often requires optimising multiple behavioural objectives. A practical approach is to apply these objectives sequentially using preference optimisation methods such as Direct Preference Optimisation (DPO), but it remains unclear whether later training uniformly degrades preferences learned earlier or whether the effect depends on the relationship between objectives. We study sequential DPO across four preference settings covering distributional conflict, multi-attribute interaction, strong safety signal, and compatible response-quality objectives. Using Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct with LoRA adapters, we evaluate all objectives after every stage wi...
| Authors | Pranav Bhandari, Nicolas Fay, Amitava Datta et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 18 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 18 June 2026 |
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