Discussion, Acknowledgements, and References

Table of Links

Abstract and 1. Introduction

2 Related Work

3 Preliminaries

4 Direct Preference Optimization

5 Theoretical Analysis of DPO

6 Experiments

7 Discussion, Acknowledgements, and References

Author Contributions

A Mathematical Derivations

A.1 Deriving the Optimum of the KL-Constrained Reward Maximization Objective

A.2 Deriving the DPO Objective Under the Bradley-Terry Model

A.3 Deriving the DPO Objective Under the Plackett-Luce Model

A.4 Deriving the Gradient of the DPO Objective and A.5 Proof of Lemma 1 and 2

A.6 Proof of Theorem 1

B DPO Implementation Details and Hyperparameters

C Further Details on the Experimental Set-Up and C.1 IMDb Sentiment Experiment and Baseline Details

C.2 GPT-4 prompts for computing summarization and dialogue win rates

C.3 Unlikelihood baseline

D Additional Empirical Results

D.1 Performance of Best of N baseline for Various N and D.2 Sample Responses and GPT-4 Judgments

D.3 Human study details

7 Discussion

Learning from preferences is a powerful, scalable framework for training capable, aligned language models. We have introduced DPO, a simple training paradigm for training language models from preferences without reinforcement learning. Rather than coercing the preference learning problem into a standard RL setting in order to use off-the-shelf RL algorithms, DPO identifies a mapping between language model policies and reward functions that enables training a language model to satisfy human preferences directly, with a simple cross-entropy loss, without reinforcement learning or loss of generality. With virtually no tuning of hyperparameters, DPO performs similarly or better than existing RLHF algorithms, including those based on PPO; DPO thus meaningfully reduces the barrier to training more language models from human preferences.

Limitations & Future Work. Our results raise several important questions for future work. How does the DPO policy generalize out of distribution, compared with learning from an explicit reward function? Our initial results suggest that DPO policies can generalize similarly to PPO-based models, but more comprehensive study is needed. For example, can training with self-labeling from the DPO policy similarly make effective use of unlabeled prompts? On another front, how does reward over-optimization manifest in the direct preference optimization setting, and is the slight decrease in performance in Figure 3-right an instance of it? Additionally, while we evaluate models up to 6B parameters, exploration of scaling DPO to state-of-the-art models orders of magnitude larger is an exciting direction for future work. Regarding evaluations, we find that the win rates computed by GPT-4 are impacted by the prompt; future work may study the best way to elicit high-quality judgments from automated systems. Finally, many possible applications of DPO exist beyond training language models from human preferences, including training generative models in other modalities.

Acknowledgements

EM gratefully acknowledges funding from a Knight-Hennessy Graduate Fellowship. CF and CM are CIFAR Fellows. This work was supported in part by the Stanford Accelerator for Learning (SAL) and Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) Generative AI for the Future of Learning seed grant program. The Stanford Center for Research on Foundation Models (CRFM) provided part of the compute resources used for the experiments in this work. This work was supported in part by ONR grant N00014-20-1-2675.

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