Is Free Self-Alignment Possible?

Aligning pretrained language models (LMs) often requires large-scale preference data and substantial computational resources. These costs become even more prohibitive for multi-objective or pluralistic alignment. Is this truly necessary? Can we perform efficient alignment using only internal model capabilities, and without additional training? To answer this question, we propose AlignEZ, a novel approach that leverages (1) self-generated preference data and (2) representation editing to achieve cost-effective, efficient alignment. By operating directly on learned representations, AlignEZ independently targets different behavioral aspects without the overhead of traditional alignment methods. Our experiments reveal that this cost-efficient procedure improves performance across diverse tasks: up to 19.9% on general alignment and 1.9% on challenging mathematical reasoning tasks, even when starting from a strong base model. AlignEZ can also align models to multiple objectives simultaneously, granting fine-grained control over multiple preference axes. Finally, we show that AlignEZ can accelerate more expensive alignment procedures--such as DPO--even under limited availability of ground-truth preference data.

@article{adila2025_2406.03642,
  title={ Is Free Self-Alignment Possible? },
  author={ Dyah Adila and Changho Shin and Yijing Zhang and Frederic Sala },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.03642},
  year={ 2025 }
}