{"paper":{"title":"The Crucial Role of Samplers in Online Direct Preference Optimization","license":"http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["cs.CL"],"primary_cat":"cs.LG","authors_text":"Ruizhe Shi, Runlong Zhou, Simon S. Du","submitted_at":"2024-09-29T07:53:50Z","abstract_excerpt":"Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a stable, scalable, and efficient solution for language model alignment. Despite its empirical success, the optimization properties, particularly the impact of samplers on its convergence rates, remain under-explored. In this paper, we provide a rigorous analysis of DPO's convergence rates with different sampling strategies under the exact gradient setting, revealing a surprising separation: uniform sampling achieves $\\textbf{linear}$ convergence, while our proposed online sampler achieves $\\textbf{quadratic}$ convergence. We further adapt th"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2409.19605","kind":"arxiv","version":3},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2409.19605/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}