Many of Your DPOs are Secretly One: Attempting Unification Through Mutual Information

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Tutnov, Rasul, Grosnit, Antoine, Bou-Ammar, Haitham
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Tutnov, Rasul
Grosnit, Antoine
Bou-Ammar, Haitham
author_facet Tutnov, Rasul
Grosnit, Antoine
Bou-Ammar, Haitham
contents Post-alignment of large language models (LLMs) is critical in improving their utility, safety, and alignment with human intentions. Direct preference optimisation (DPO) has become one of the most widely used algorithms for achieving this alignment, given its ability to optimise models based on human feedback directly. However, the vast number of DPO variants in the literature has made it increasingly difficult for researchers to navigate and fully grasp the connections between these approaches. This paper introduces a unifying framework inspired by mutual information, which proposes a new loss function with flexible priors. By carefully specifying these priors, we demonstrate that many existing algorithms, such as SimPO, TDPO, SparsePO, and others, can be derived from our framework. This unification offers a clearer and more structured approach, allowing researchers to understand the relationships between different DPO variants better. We aim to simplify the landscape of DPO algorithms, making it easier for the research community to gain insights and foster further advancements in LLM alignment. Ultimately, we hope our framework can be a foundation for developing more robust and interpretable alignment techniques.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_01544
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Many of Your DPOs are Secretly One: Attempting Unification Through Mutual Information
Tutnov, Rasul
Grosnit, Antoine
Bou-Ammar, Haitham
Machine Learning
Computation and Language
Post-alignment of large language models (LLMs) is critical in improving their utility, safety, and alignment with human intentions. Direct preference optimisation (DPO) has become one of the most widely used algorithms for achieving this alignment, given its ability to optimise models based on human feedback directly. However, the vast number of DPO variants in the literature has made it increasingly difficult for researchers to navigate and fully grasp the connections between these approaches. This paper introduces a unifying framework inspired by mutual information, which proposes a new loss function with flexible priors. By carefully specifying these priors, we demonstrate that many existing algorithms, such as SimPO, TDPO, SparsePO, and others, can be derived from our framework. This unification offers a clearer and more structured approach, allowing researchers to understand the relationships between different DPO variants better. We aim to simplify the landscape of DPO algorithms, making it easier for the research community to gain insights and foster further advancements in LLM alignment. Ultimately, we hope our framework can be a foundation for developing more robust and interpretable alignment techniques.
title Many of Your DPOs are Secretly One: Attempting Unification Through Mutual Information
topic Machine Learning
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.01544