Which Objectives Need a Dial? Predicting Objective Conflict and Covering Trade-offs in Steerable Pluralistic Alignment
People hold diverse, sometimes conflicting values, so no single aligned model can satisfy everyone. Pluralistic alignment therefore calls for steerable models that can balance competing objectives differently. Multi-Objective Direct Preference Optimization (MODPO) does this by using an objective weight to span a continuum of trade-offs. We study two questions: when can one model improve two objectives simultaneously, and how can many trade-offs be covered without training a separate model for each? Across seven objective pairs from HelpSteer and UltraFeedback, two pre-training measurements predict whether objectives align or conflict for human-annotated data, but not for AI-annotated data...
| Authors | David Tsoi, Esra Dönmez |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 22 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 22 September 2026 |
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