In plain words: A few human-labeled good-versus-bad answer pairs are mixed with many unlabeled answers; a score cutoff separates winners from losers, so the unlabeled ones get automatic labels. With just 1% of the labeled data it beat rivals trained on 10%.
Abstract
The field of preference optimization has made outstanding contributions to the alignment of language models with human preferences. Despite these advancements, recent methods still rely heavily on substantial paired (labeled) feedback data, leading to substantial resource expenditures. To address these challenges, we study the problem of Semi-Supervised Preference Optimization (SSPO) in which the idea is to learn from both a small number of pairwise preference labels and a large pool of unpaired samples simultaneously. Our key theoretical contribution proves the existence of an optimal reward threshold capable of separating winning and losing responses with high probability, which enables a principled pseudo-labeling of unpaired data. By leveraging these pseudo-labels, SSPO effectively distills latent preferences from large-scale unpaired data, thus maintaining human alignment while drastically reducing acquisition costs. Extensive experiments across datasets validate this remarkable data efficiency; for instance, SSPO trained with Mistral-7B-Instruct on just 1% of UltraFeedback consistently surpasses strong baselines trained on 10% of UltraFeedback.
Seonggyun Lee, Sungjun Lim, Seojin Park, Soeun Cheon, Kyungwoo Song
arXiv:2511.00040 · cs.LG, cs.AI · submitted Oct 28, 2025 · updated Feb 19, 2026
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