Humanline: Online Alignment as Perceptual Loss
Authors: name: Sijia Liu; name: Niklas Muennighoff; name: Kawin Ethayarajh
Published: 2025-09-29 02:41:16

Abstract: Online alignment (e.g., GRPO) is generally more performant than offline
alignment (e.g., DPO) -- but why? Drawing on prospect theory from behavioral
economics, we propose a human-centric explanation. We prove that online
on-policy sampling better approximates the human-perceived distribution of what
the model can produce, and PPO/GRPO-style clipping -- originally introduced to
just stabilize training -- recovers a perceptual bias in how humans perceive
probability. In this sense, PPO/GRPO act as perceptual losses already. Our
theory further suggests that the online/offline dichotomy is itself incidental
to maximizing human utility, since we can achieve the same effect by
selectively training on any data in a manner that mimics human perception,
rather than restricting ourselves to online on-policy data. Doing so would
allow us to post-train more quickly, cheaply, and flexibly without sacrificing
performance. To this end, we propose a design pattern that explicitly
incorporates perceptual distortions of probability into objectives like
DPO/KTO/GRPO, creating humanline variants of them. Surprisingly, we find that
these humanline variants, even when trained with offline off-policy data, can
match the performance of their online counterparts on both verifiable and
unverifiable tasks.