Alex Semendinger

Spurious Correlation Learning in Preference Optimization: Mechanisms, Consequences, and Mitigation via Tie Training

Preference learning methods like Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) are known to induce reliance on spurious correlations, leading to sycophancy and length bias in today's language models and potentially severe goal misgeneralization in future systems. In this work, we provide a unified theoretica…