Taylor Sorensen, Pushkar Mishra, Roma Patel, Michael Henry Tessler, Michiel A. Bakker, Georgina Evans, Iason Gabriel, Noah Goodman, Verena Rieser. Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2025.

Human feedback plays a critical role in learning and refining reward models for text-to-image generation, but the optimal form the feedback should take for learning an accurate reward function has not been conclusively established. This paper investigates the effectiveness of fine-grained feedback which captures nuanced distinctions in image quality and prompt-alignment, compared to traditional coarse-grained feedback (for example, thumbs up/down or ranking between a set of options). While fine-grained feedback holds promise, particularly for systems catering to diverse societal preferences, we show that demonstrating its superiority to coarse-grained feedback is not automatic. Through experiments on real and synthetic preference data, we surface the complexities of building effective models due to the interplay of model choice, feedback type, and the alignment between human judgment and computational interpretation. We identify key challenges in eliciting and utilizing fine-grained feedback, prompting a reassessment of its assumed benefits and practicality. Our findings -- e.g., that fine-grained feedback can lead to worse models for a fixed budget, in some settings; however, in controlled settings with known attributes, fine grained rewards can indeed be more helpful -- call for careful consideration of feedback attributes and potentially beckon novel modeling approaches to appropriately unlock the potential value of fine-grained feedback in-the-wild.

We provide an improved analysis of standard differentially private gradient descent for linear regression under the squared error loss. Under modest assumptions on the input, we characterize the distribution of the iterate at each time step. Our analysis leads to new results on the algorithm’s accuracy: for a proper fixed choice of hyperparameters, the sample complexity depends only linearly on the dimension of the data. This matches the dimension-dependence of the (non-private) ordinary least squares estimator as well as that of recent private algorithms that rely on sophisticated adaptive gradient-clipping schemes (Varshney et al., 2022; Liu et al., 2023). Our analysis of the iterates’ distribution also allows us to construct confidence intervals for the empirical optimizer which adapt automatically to the variance of the algorithm on a particular data set. We validate our theorems through experiments on synthetic data.