Metropolis-Hastings Dominates Importance Resampling for Policy Composition
Abstract
Post-training a large language model (LLM) often requires exploring trade-offs between multiple rewards, but retraining for each trade-off is expensive. Decoding-time policy composition allows these trade-offs to be adjusted by combining reward-specific policies at inference time. This composition targets a weighted product of the policies'probabilities over complete responses, but standard implementations combine their next-token probabilities, generally introducing sampling bias. We analyze a known iterative correction based on independence Metropolis-Hastings (MH). Our main result shows that, for every rollout budget, MH produces an output distribution at least as close to the target as sampling-importance-resampling (SIR) with the same budget, as measured by every convex f-divergence. We also derive a lower bound on MH's improvement over the uncorrected decoder in a consensus objective measuring agreement with the supplied policies. We further characterize the correction's sampling error in two asymptotic regimes: when the reward-specific policies approach agreement, and when the log ratio between target and uncorrected-decoder probabilities fluctuates increasingly widely, as can happen for long responses. We complement our analysis with experiments in enumerable and LLM-scale settings.
