TGDPO: Harnessing Token-Level Reward Guidance for Enhancing Direct Preference Optimization

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Zhu, Mingkang, Chen, Xi, Wang, Zhongdao, Yu, Bei, Zhao, Hengshuang, Jia, Jiaya
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Zhu, Mingkang
Chen, Xi
Wang, Zhongdao
Yu, Bei
Zhao, Hengshuang
Jia, Jiaya
author_facet Zhu, Mingkang
Chen, Xi
Wang, Zhongdao
Yu, Bei
Zhao, Hengshuang
Jia, Jiaya
contents Recent advancements in reinforcement learning from human feedback have shown that utilizing fine-grained token-level reward models can substantially enhance the performance of Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) in aligning large language models. However, it is challenging to leverage such token-level reward as guidance for Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), since DPO is formulated as a sequence-level bandit problem. To address this challenge, this work decomposes the sequence-level PPO into a sequence of token-level proximal policy optimization problems and then frames the problem of token-level PPO with token-level reward guidance, from which closed-form optimal token-level policy and the corresponding token-level reward can be derived. Using the obtained reward and Bradley-Terry model, this work establishes a framework of computable loss functions with token-level reward guidance for DPO, and proposes a practical reward guidance based on the induced DPO reward. This formulation enables different tokens to exhibit varying degrees of deviation from reference policy based on their respective rewards. Experiment results demonstrate that our method achieves substantial performance improvements over DPO, with win rate gains of up to 7.5 points on MT-Bench, 6.2 points on AlpacaEval 2, and 4.3 points on Arena-Hard. Code is available at https://github.com/dvlab-research/TGDPO.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_14574
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle TGDPO: Harnessing Token-Level Reward Guidance for Enhancing Direct Preference Optimization
Zhu, Mingkang
Chen, Xi
Wang, Zhongdao
Yu, Bei
Zhao, Hengshuang
Jia, Jiaya
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Recent advancements in reinforcement learning from human feedback have shown that utilizing fine-grained token-level reward models can substantially enhance the performance of Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) in aligning large language models. However, it is challenging to leverage such token-level reward as guidance for Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), since DPO is formulated as a sequence-level bandit problem. To address this challenge, this work decomposes the sequence-level PPO into a sequence of token-level proximal policy optimization problems and then frames the problem of token-level PPO with token-level reward guidance, from which closed-form optimal token-level policy and the corresponding token-level reward can be derived. Using the obtained reward and Bradley-Terry model, this work establishes a framework of computable loss functions with token-level reward guidance for DPO, and proposes a practical reward guidance based on the induced DPO reward. This formulation enables different tokens to exhibit varying degrees of deviation from reference policy based on their respective rewards. Experiment results demonstrate that our method achieves substantial performance improvements over DPO, with win rate gains of up to 7.5 points on MT-Bench, 6.2 points on AlpacaEval 2, and 4.3 points on Arena-Hard. Code is available at https://github.com/dvlab-research/TGDPO.
title TGDPO: Harnessing Token-Level Reward Guidance for Enhancing Direct Preference Optimization
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14574