DeAL: Decoding-time Alignment for Large Language Models

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2402.06147v3
• Date: Sun, 12 Oct 2025 07:05:52 GMT
• Title: DeAL: Decoding-time Alignment for Large Language Models
• Authors: James Y. Huang, Sailik Sengupta, Daniele Bonadiman, Yi-An Lai, Arshit Gupta, Nikolaos Pappas, Saab Mansour, Katrin Kirchhoff, Dan Roth,
• Abstract summary: Large Language Models (LLMs) are nowadays expected to generate content aligned with human preferences.<n>We propose DeAL, a framework that allows the user to customize reward functions and enables Decoding-time alignment of LLMs.
• Score: 58.368979253590794
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are nowadays expected to generate content aligned with human preferences. Current work focuses on alignment at model training time, through techniques such as Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF). However, it is unclear if such methods are an effective choice to teach alignment objectives to the model. First, the inability to incorporate multiple, custom rewards and reliance on a model developer's view of universal and static principles are key limitations. Second, the reliability of such approaches is also questionable (e.g. susceptibility to jailbreaking even after safety training). To address these issues, we propose DeAL, a framework that allows the user to customize reward functions and enables Decoding-time Alignment of LLMs (DeAL). At its core, we view decoding as a heuristic-guided search process and facilitate the use of a wide variety of alignment objectives. Our experiments with programmatic constraints such as keyword and length constraints, and abstract objectives such as harmlessness and helpfulness, show that we can DeAL with fine-grained trade-offs and improve adherence to alignment objectives. Lastly, we demonstrate that DeAL is largely complementary to existing alignment strategies, and can be effectively paired with RLHF and prompting techniques to achieve better alignment.

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