Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Nath, Abhijnan, Jung, Changsoo, Seefried, Ethan, Krishnaswamy, Nikhil
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.08458
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866929692953542656
author Nath, Abhijnan
Jung, Changsoo
Seefried, Ethan
Krishnaswamy, Nikhil
author_facet Nath, Abhijnan
Jung, Changsoo
Seefried, Ethan
Krishnaswamy, Nikhil
contents Traditional RLHF-based LLM alignment methods explicitly maximize the expected rewards from a separate reward model. More recent supervised alignment methods like Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) circumvent this phase to avoid problems including model drift and reward overfitting. Although popular due to its simplicity, DPO and similar direct alignment methods which rely heavily on the Bradley-Terry-based pairwise preference formulation can still lead to degenerate policies when challenged by non-deterministic or noisy preference labels, for example human scoring of two candidate outputs with low confidence. This paper introduces DRDO (Direct Reward Distillation and policy-Optimization), which simultaneously models rewards and preferences to avoid such degeneracy. DRDO directly mimics rewards assigned by an oracle while learning human preferences with a novel preference likelihood formulation. Results on the Ultrafeedback and TL;DR datasets demonstrate that DRDO-trained policies surpass methods such as DPO and e-DPO in terms of expected rewards and are more robust, on average, to noisy preference signals as well as out-of-distribution (OOD) settings.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_08458
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Simultaneous Reward Distillation and Preference Learning: Get You a Language Model Who Can Do Both
Nath, Abhijnan
Jung, Changsoo
Seefried, Ethan
Krishnaswamy, Nikhil
Machine Learning
Computation and Language
Traditional RLHF-based LLM alignment methods explicitly maximize the expected rewards from a separate reward model. More recent supervised alignment methods like Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) circumvent this phase to avoid problems including model drift and reward overfitting. Although popular due to its simplicity, DPO and similar direct alignment methods which rely heavily on the Bradley-Terry-based pairwise preference formulation can still lead to degenerate policies when challenged by non-deterministic or noisy preference labels, for example human scoring of two candidate outputs with low confidence. This paper introduces DRDO (Direct Reward Distillation and policy-Optimization), which simultaneously models rewards and preferences to avoid such degeneracy. DRDO directly mimics rewards assigned by an oracle while learning human preferences with a novel preference likelihood formulation. Results on the Ultrafeedback and TL;DR datasets demonstrate that DRDO-trained policies surpass methods such as DPO and e-DPO in terms of expected rewards and are more robust, on average, to noisy preference signals as well as out-of-distribution (OOD) settings.
title Simultaneous Reward Distillation and Preference Learning: Get You a Language Model Who Can Do Both
topic Machine Learning
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.08458