AAPA: Adversarially Anchored Preference Alignment for Post-Training of Large Language Models

Post-training alignment of large language models often combines supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on expert demonstrations with reinforcement learning (RL) from preference or verifiable feedback. SFT provides a useful behavioral anchor but can overfit to static demonstrations, whereas RL encourages exploration but may drift from expert behavior or exploit imperfect rewards. We propose AAPA (Adversarially Anchored Preference Alignment), a plug-in framework that augments existing post-training objectives with a sentence-level adversarial anchoring signal. AAPA compares policy rollouts with offline, pre-collected expert responses using a fixed lightweight discriminator, and therefore requires neither online teacher inference nor discriminator co-training during policy optimization. The same anchoring term can be added to SFT, GRPO, and CHORD while preserving their original training pipelines. Experiments on instruction-following benchmarks show that AAPA consistently improves the corresponding base objectives across model scales. In particular, the staged AAPA configuration improves over a strong GRPO baseline by 5.77% on textttQwen3-0.6B and 3.75% on textttQwen3-4B. Further analyses on response length, log-probability distributions, and discriminator variants suggest that adversarial anchoring provides a stable semantic grounding signal for preference optimization. Code is available at urlhttps://github.com/IsFaqq/AAPA.