RE-PO: Robust Enhanced Policy Optimization as a General Framework for LLM Alignment

Xiaoyang Cao, Zelai Xu, Mo Guang, Kaiwen Long, Michiel Bakker, Yu Wang, Chao Yu

International Conference on Learning Representations 2026 (ICLR 2026) Conference

Standard human preference-based alignment methods, such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), are a cornerstone technology for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human values. However, these methods are all underpinned by a strong assumption that the collected preference data is clean and that all observed labels are equally reliable. In reality, large-scale preference datasets contain substantial label noise due to annotator errors, inconsistent instructions, varying expertise, and even adversarial or low-effort feedback. This creates a discrepancy between the recorded data and the ground-truth preferences, which can misguide the model and degrade its performance. To address this challenge, we introduce Robust Enhanced Policy Optimization (RE-PO). RE-PO employs an Expectation-Maximization algorithm to infer the posterior probability of each label’s correctness, which is used to adaptively re-weigh each data point in the training loss to mitigate noise. We further generalize this approach by linking a broad class of preference losses to induced probabilistic models. This enables systematic robustification of existing alignment algorithms while preserving exact probabilistic equivalence for likelihood-style losses. Theoretically, under perfect calibration and a population/full-batch setting, we show that RE-PO recovers the true annotator reliability. Our experiments demonstrate RE-PO’s effectiveness as a general framework, generally enhancing four state-of-the-art alignment algorithms (DPO, IPO, SimPO, and CPO) against their corresponding standard versions. When applied to Mistral and Llama 3 models, the RE-PO-enhanced methods improve AlpacaEval 2 win rates by up to 7.0% over their respective baselines.