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Unpacking DPO and PPO: Disentangling Best Practices for Learning from Preference Feedback

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arxiv 2406.09279 v2 pith:MNN2C64N submitted 2024-06-13 cs.CL

classification cs.CL
keywords learningpreferencemodelsdatafeedbackhttpsimprovementsperformance
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Learning from preference feedback has emerged as an essential step for improving the generation quality and performance of modern language models (LMs). Despite its widespread use, the way preference-based learning is applied varies wildly, with differing data, learning algorithms, and evaluations used, making disentangling the impact of each aspect difficult. In this work, we identify four core aspects of preference-based learning: preference data, learning algorithm, reward model, and policy training prompts, systematically investigate the impact of these components on downstream model performance, and suggest a recipe for strong learning for preference feedback. Our findings indicate that all aspects are important for performance, with better preference data leading to the largest improvements, followed by the choice of learning algorithm, the use of improved reward models, and finally the use of additional unlabeled prompts for policy training. Notably, PPO outperforms DPO by up to 2.5% in math and 1.2% in general domains. High-quality preference data leads to improvements of up to 8% in instruction following and truthfulness. Despite significant gains of up to 5% in mathematical evaluation when scaling up reward models, we surprisingly observe marginal improvements in other categories. We publicly release the code used for training (https://github.com/hamishivi/EasyLM) and evaluating (https://github.com/allenai/open-instruct) our models, along with the models and datasets themselves (https://huggingface.co/collections/allenai/tulu-v25-suite-66676520fd578080e126f618).

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Cited by 6 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Rethinking DPO: The Role of Rejected Responses in Preference Misalignment

    cs.AI 2025-06 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    BDPO replaces the rejected response probability in the DPO loss denominator with a mixture of the learned and reference policies, yielding better chosen-response probability and better benchmark scores.

  2. AutoMixAlign: Adaptive Data Mixing for Multi-Task Preference Optimization in LLMs

    cs.LG 2025-05 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    AutoMixAlign adaptively reweights or resamples task data during DPO training to match specialist-model losses, improving average performance on helpfulness, coding, and safety benchmarks compared to standard DPO and m...

  3. Aligning Language Models with Observational Data: Opportunities and Risks from a Causal Perspective

    cs.LG 2025-05 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    Fine-tuning LLMs on observational logs can amplify spurious patterns such as weekday effects, and a confounder-subtraction method, DeconfoundLM, restores causal signal in self-built simulations.

  4. Technical Report of TeleChat2, TeleChat2.5 and T1

    cs.CL 2025-07 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    The released T1-115B open-weight model outperforms OpenAI's o1-mini and GPT-4o on MATH500, AlignBench, and IFEval, despite using a standard dense transformer architecture.

  5. Building Task Bots with Self-learning for Enhanced Adaptability, Extensibility, and Factuality

    cs.CL 2025-08 conditional novelty 2.0 of 10

    A thesis that combines self-learning from dialog logs, schema-guided prompting, and self-aligned factuality to build task bots with minimal human intervention.

  6. Inverse Reinforcement Learning Meets Large Language Model Post-Training: Basics, Advances, and Opportunities

    cs.LG 2025-07 unverdicted novelty 1.0 of 10

    A tutorial reviewing LLM alignment through the lens of inverse reinforcement learning, arguing that neural reward models learned from human data are central to post-training.

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