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arXiv · 2602.08259

A Statistical Framework for Alignment with Biased AI Feedback

Xintao Xia·Zhiqiu Xia·Linjun Zhang·Zhanrui Cai
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Abstract

Modern alignment pipelines are increasingly replacing expensive human preference labels with evaluations from large language models (LLM-as-Judge). However, AI labels can be systematically biased compared to high-quality human feedback datasets. In this paper, we develop two debiased alignment methods within a general framework that accommodates heterogeneous prompt-response distributions and external human feedback sources. Debiased Direct Preference Optimization (DDPO) augments standard DPO with a residual-based correction and density-ratio reweighting to mitigate systematic bias, while retaining DPO's computational efficiency. Debiased Identity Preference Optimization (DIPO) directly estimates human preference probabilities without imposing a parametric reward model. We provide theoretical guarantees for both methods: DDPO offers a practical and computationally efficient solution for large-scale alignment, whereas DIPO serves as a robust, statistically optimal alternative that attains the semiparametric efficiency bound. Empirical studies on sentiment generation, summarization, and single-turn dialogue demonstrate that the proposed methods substantially improve alignment efficiency and recover performance close to that of an oracle trained on fully human-labeled data.

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Xintao Xia, Zhiqiu Xia, Linjun Zhang, Zhanrui Cai. 2026-02-09. A Statistical Framework for Alignment with Biased AI Feedback. https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08259

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