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

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ivison, Hamish, Wang, Yizhong, Liu, Jiacheng, Wu, Zeqiu, Pyatkin, Valentina, Lambert, Nathan, Smith, Noah A., Choi, Yejin, Hajishirzi, Hannaneh
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Ivison, Hamish
Wang, Yizhong
Liu, Jiacheng
Wu, Zeqiu
Pyatkin, Valentina
Lambert, Nathan
Smith, Noah A.
Choi, Yejin
Hajishirzi, Hannaneh
author_facet Ivison, Hamish
Wang, Yizhong
Liu, Jiacheng
Wu, Zeqiu
Pyatkin, Valentina
Lambert, Nathan
Smith, Noah A.
Choi, Yejin
Hajishirzi, Hannaneh
contents 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).
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_09279
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Unpacking DPO and PPO: Disentangling Best Practices for Learning from Preference Feedback
Ivison, Hamish
Wang, Yizhong
Liu, Jiacheng
Wu, Zeqiu
Pyatkin, Valentina
Lambert, Nathan
Smith, Noah A.
Choi, Yejin
Hajishirzi, Hannaneh
Computation and Language
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).
title Unpacking DPO and PPO: Disentangling Best Practices for Learning from Preference Feedback
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.09279