Direct Diversity Optimization for Diverse Successful Trajectories in Preference Post-Training
Mirrored from arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language for archival readability. Support the source by reading on the original site.
Computer Science > Computation and Language
Title:Direct Diversity Optimization for Diverse Successful Trajectories in Preference Post-Training
Abstract:LLM agents for sequential decision tasks are often post-trained with trajectory-level outcome labels, but such labels provide little supervision for preserving multiple successful branches from the same decision state. We study this problem as successful strategy coverage: how broadly a model realizes distinct successful strategies under a fixed rollout budget. We present Direct Diversity Optimization (DDO), an offline post-training method that combines Divergence-Tree Collection (DTC) with the Reference-Relative Target-Odds Objective (RTO). DTC constructs state-aligned branch sets rooted at shared decision states, and RTO trains the model to match reference-relative targets over successful alternatives. DDO achieves the strongest task success and successful strategy coverage among the compared post-training methods across BabyAI, BabaIsAI, and WebShop. It also achieves the highest recovery rate after local action replacement and higher task success and coverage than successful-only imitation and decoding-time diversification controls.
| Comments: | Accepted to EMNLP 2026 Main Conference. 19 pages, 11 figures |
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (cs.LG) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2609.10052 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2609.10052v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.10052
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
|
Access Paper:
- View PDF
- HTML (experimental)
- TeX Source
Current browse context:
References & Citations
Bibliographic and Citation Tools
Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article
Demos
Recommenders and Search Tools
arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators
arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.
Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.
Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.
More from arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language
-
A Mechanistic Study of AI-Text Detection Neurons in Frozen BERT: Sparse Probing and Activation Patching on RAID
Sep 28
-
Manifold Projection and Iterative Autoencoder Refinement for Masked Language Modeling
Sep 28
-
Not All Memories Are Equal: Hierarchical Collaborative Memory for Validity-Aware Retrieval in LLM Agents
Sep 28
-
Auditing and Repairing LLM-as-Judge Failures in a Production Text-to-SQL Pipeline
Sep 28
Discussion (0)
Sign in to join the discussion. Free account, 30 seconds — email code or GitHub.
Sign in →No comments yet. Sign in and be the first to say something.