Unsupervised Model Improvement Through Internal Coherence Maximization

https://huggingface.co/blog/codelion/internal-coherence-maximization

The article presents a novel method for improving large language models (LLMs) called Internal Coherence Maximization (ICM) combined with Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), which operates without any human supervision. This unsupervised approach demonstrates superior performance in mathematical reasoning tasks compared to traditional human-supervised methods like Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Key contributions include a complete implementation of ICM with diverse solution generation and a pipeline to convert ICM results into preference pairs for DPO training. The research also shows successful cross-model capability transfer, where knowledge from a stronger model (Qwen3) improves a weaker one (Gemma3), offering a scalable and cost-effective alternative to current LLM alignment paradigms. The authors emphasize that pretrained models already possess rich understanding, and ICM+DPO offers a way to elicit and refine this internal coherence, leading to better performance without the bottleneck of human annotation.