Go to ICLR 2026 Conference homepageWorldPM: Understanding Scaling Patterns in Human Preference Modeling
Keywords: reward modeling; human preference; scaling law; RLHF; Alignment
TL;DR: We collect massive human preference data from forums to scale human preference modeling, and investigate the scaling patterns across several dimensions.
Abstract: Motivated by scaling laws in language modeling that demonstrate how test loss scales as a power law with model and dataset sizes, we find that similar laws exist in preference modeling. We propose **World** **P**reference **M**odeling (WorldPM) to emphasize this scaling potential, where World Preference embodies a unified representation of human preferences. In this paper, we collect preference data from public forums covering diverse user communities, and conduct extensive training using 15M-scale data across models ranging from 1.5B to 72B parameters. We observe distinct patterns across different evaluation metrics: (1) Adversarial metrics (ability to identify deceptive features) consistently scale up with increased training data and base model size; (2) Objective metrics (objective knowledge with well-defined answers) show emergent behavior in larger language models, highlighting WorldPM's scalability potential; (3) Subjective metrics (subjective preferences from a limited number of humans or AI) do not demonstrate scaling trends. Further experiments validate the effectiveness of WorldPM as a foundation for preference fine-tuning. Through evaluations on 7 benchmarks with 16 subtasks, we find that WorldPM broadly improves the generalization performance across human preference datasets of varying sizes (7K, 100K and 800K samples), with performance gains exceeding 5% on many key subtasks.
Primary Area: foundation or frontier models, including LLMs
Submission Number: 3012
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