Select Before Use: On the Importance of Reference Model Selection in Preference Alignment
Muyang Li, Runze Wu IROOTECH TECHNOLOGY, Xiangyu Zhao City University of Hong Kong, Bo Han, Daoyi Dong University of Technology Sydney, Tongliang Liu University of Sydney and RIKEN
The post-training stage of Large Language Models (LLMs) typically involves Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by preference alignment to ensure LLM to generate safe, helpful, and instruction-aligned content. The SFT model critically serves as both the initialization and reference model for subsequent preference alignment. However, an essential yet often neglected question is the optimal selection of the SFT checkpoint for this role. We show that checkpoint selection substantially affects final performance, and that the common practice of choosing the minimum validation-loss checkpoint often fails, due to a fundamental conflict between SFT’s focus on imitation and alignment’s goal of response discriminability. To this end, we propose RewardRank, a simple, effective, training-free metrics for estimating initial implicit alignment between reference model and preference objective. Empirical evidence suggests that, using our selected model as reference can gain up to 67.6% relative increase on length-controlled win rate on the popular Zephyr recipe comparing to baselines.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表