@inproceedings{li-etal-2026-team,
title = "Team-Based Self-Play With Dual Adaptive Weighting for Fine-Tuning {LLM}s",
author = "Li, Wu and
Zhou, Yigeng and
Shi, Zesheng and
Wang, Yequan and
Zhang, Min and
Li, Jing",
editor = "Liakata, Maria and
Moreira, Viviane P. and
Zhang, Jiajun and
Jurgens, David",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2026",
address = "San Diego, California, United States",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.847/",
pages = "18617--18632",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
abstract = "While recent self-training approaches have reduced reliance on human-labeled data for aligning LLMs, they still face critical limitations: (i) sensitivity to synthetic data quality, leading to instability and bias amplification in iterative training; (ii) ineffective optimization due to a diminishing gap between positive and negative responses over successive training iterations. In this paper, we propose Team-based self-Play with dual Adaptive Weighting (TPAW), a novel self-play algorithm designed to improve alignment in a fully self-supervised setting. TPAW adopts a team-based framework in which the current policy model both collaborates with and competes against historical checkpoints, promoting more stable and efficient optimization. To further enhance learning, we design two adaptive weighting mechanisms: (i) a response reweighting scheme that adjusts the importance of target responses, and (ii) a player weighting strategy that dynamically modulates each team member{'}s contribution during training. Initialized from a SFT model, TPAW iteratively refines alignment without requiring additional human supervision. Experimental results demonstrate that TPAW consistently outperforms existing baselines across various base models and LLM benchmarks."
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Team-Based Self-Play With Dual Adaptive Weighting for Fine-Tuning LLMs
%A Li, Wu
%A Zhou, Yigeng
%A Shi, Zesheng
%A Wang, Yequan
%A Zhang, Min
%A Li, Jing
%Y Liakata, Maria
%Y Moreira, Viviane P.
%Y Zhang, Jiajun
%Y Jurgens, David
%S Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, California, United States
%@ 979-8-89176-390-6
%F li-etal-2026-team
%X While recent self-training approaches have reduced reliance on human-labeled data for aligning LLMs, they still face critical limitations: (i) sensitivity to synthetic data quality, leading to instability and bias amplification in iterative training; (ii) ineffective optimization due to a diminishing gap between positive and negative responses over successive training iterations. In this paper, we propose Team-based self-Play with dual Adaptive Weighting (TPAW), a novel self-play algorithm designed to improve alignment in a fully self-supervised setting. TPAW adopts a team-based framework in which the current policy model both collaborates with and competes against historical checkpoints, promoting more stable and efficient optimization. To further enhance learning, we design two adaptive weighting mechanisms: (i) a response reweighting scheme that adjusts the importance of target responses, and (ii) a player weighting strategy that dynamically modulates each team member’s contribution during training. Initialized from a SFT model, TPAW iteratively refines alignment without requiring additional human supervision. Experimental results demonstrate that TPAW consistently outperforms existing baselines across various base models and LLM benchmarks.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.847/
%P 18617-18632
Markdown (Informal)
[Team-Based Self-Play With Dual Adaptive Weighting for Fine-Tuning LLMs](https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.847/) (Li et al., ACL 2026)
ACL
- Wu Li, Yigeng Zhou, Zesheng Shi, Yequan Wang, Min Zhang, and Jing Li. 2026. Team-Based Self-Play With Dual Adaptive Weighting for Fine-Tuning LLMs. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 18617–18632, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.