Selective Preference Optimization via Token-Level Reward Function Estimation

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Yang, Kailai, Liu, Zhiwei, Xie, Qianqian, Huang, Jimin, Min, Erxue, Ananiadou, Sophia
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866917063174389760
author Yang, Kailai
Liu, Zhiwei
Xie, Qianqian
Huang, Jimin
Min, Erxue
Ananiadou, Sophia
author_facet Yang, Kailai
Liu, Zhiwei
Xie, Qianqian
Huang, Jimin
Min, Erxue
Ananiadou, Sophia
contents Recent advancements in large language model alignment leverage token-level supervisions to perform fine-grained preference optimization. However, existing token-level alignment methods either optimize on all available tokens, which can be noisy and inefficient, or perform selective training with complex and expensive key token selection strategies. In this work, we propose Selective Preference Optimization (SePO), a novel selective alignment strategy that centers on efficient key token selection. SePO proposes the first token selection method based on Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), which trains an oracle model to estimate a token-level reward function on the target data. This method applies to any existing alignment datasets with response-level annotations and enables cost-efficient token selection with small-scale oracle models and training data. The estimated reward function is then utilized to score all tokens within the target dataset, where only the key tokens are selected to supervise the target policy model with a reference model-free contrastive objective function. Extensive experiments on three public evaluation benchmarks show that SePO significantly outperforms competitive baseline methods by only optimizing 30% key tokens on the target dataset. SePO applications on weak-to-strong generalization show that weak oracle models effectively supervise strong policy models with up to 16.8x more parameters. SePO also effectively selects key tokens from out-of-distribution data to enhance strong policy models and alleviate the over-optimization problem.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_13518
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Selective Preference Optimization via Token-Level Reward Function Estimation
Yang, Kailai
Liu, Zhiwei
Xie, Qianqian
Huang, Jimin
Min, Erxue
Ananiadou, Sophia
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Recent advancements in large language model alignment leverage token-level supervisions to perform fine-grained preference optimization. However, existing token-level alignment methods either optimize on all available tokens, which can be noisy and inefficient, or perform selective training with complex and expensive key token selection strategies. In this work, we propose Selective Preference Optimization (SePO), a novel selective alignment strategy that centers on efficient key token selection. SePO proposes the first token selection method based on Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), which trains an oracle model to estimate a token-level reward function on the target data. This method applies to any existing alignment datasets with response-level annotations and enables cost-efficient token selection with small-scale oracle models and training data. The estimated reward function is then utilized to score all tokens within the target dataset, where only the key tokens are selected to supervise the target policy model with a reference model-free contrastive objective function. Extensive experiments on three public evaluation benchmarks show that SePO significantly outperforms competitive baseline methods by only optimizing 30% key tokens on the target dataset. SePO applications on weak-to-strong generalization show that weak oracle models effectively supervise strong policy models with up to 16.8x more parameters. SePO also effectively selects key tokens from out-of-distribution data to enhance strong policy models and alleviate the over-optimization problem.
title Selective Preference Optimization via Token-Level Reward Function Estimation
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.13518