Accelerating Nash Learning from Human Feedback via Mirror Prox

Abstract: Traditional Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) often relies on reward models, frequently assuming preference structures like the Bradley-Terry model, which may not accurately capture the complexities of real human preferences (e.g., intransitivity). Nash Learning from Human Feedback (NLHF) offers a more direct alternative by framing the problem as finding a Nash equilibrium of a game defined by these preferences. In this work, we introduce Nash Mirror Prox ($\mathtt{Nash-MP}$), an online NLHF algorithm that leverages the Mirror Prox optimization scheme to achieve fast and stable convergence to the Nash equilibrium. Our theoretical analysis establishes that Nash-MP exhibits last-iterate linear convergence towards the $\beta$-regularized Nash equilibrium. Specifically, we prove that the KL-divergence to the optimal policy decreases at a rate of order $(1+2\beta)^{-N/2}$, where $N$ is a number of preference queries. We further demonstrate last-iterate linear convergence for the exploitability gap and uniformly for the span semi-norm of log-probabilities, with all these rates being independent of the size of the action space. Furthermore, we propose and analyze an approximate version of Nash-MP where proximal steps are estimated using stochastic policy gradients, making the algorithm closer to applications. Finally, we detail a practical implementation strategy for fine-tuning LLMs and present experiments that demonstrate its competitive performance and compatibility with existing methods.