Alignment through Meta-Weighted Online Sampling: Bridging the Gap
  between Data Generation and Preference Optimization
Authors: name: Junming Yang; name: Ning Xu; name: Biao Liu; name: Shiqi Qiao; name: Xin Geng
Published: 2025-09-27 15:38:24

Abstract: Preference optimization is crucial for aligning large language models (LLMs)
with human values and intentions. A significant challenge in this process is
the distribution mismatch between pre-collected offline preference data and the
evolving model policy. Existing methods attempt to reduce this gap using static
heuristics or decoupled online sampling strategies, but they often fail to
adapt to the model's dynamic learning state. To bridge this gap, we propose
Meta-Weighted Adaptive Preference Optimization (MetaAPO), a novel framework
that dynamically couples data generation with model training. MetaAPO employs a
lightweight meta-learner, as an "alignment gap estimator", to evaluate the
potential benefits of on-policy sampling in relation to offline data. This
guides targeted online generation and assigns sample-wise meta-weights to the
optimization objective, dynamically balancing the quality and distribution of
online and offline data. Experiments on AlpacaEval 2, Arena-Hard and MT-Bench
demonstrate that MetaAPO consistently outperforms existing preference
optimization approaches across various settings, while reducing 42% in online
annotation costs.