Beyond Reward Margin: Rethinking and Resolving Likelihood Displacement in Diffusion Models via Video Generation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Xu, Ruojun, Kai, Yu, Ren, Xuhua, Cheng, Jiaxiang, Ma, Bing, Zheng, Tianxiang, Lu, Qinhlin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Xu, Ruojun
Kai, Yu
Ren, Xuhua
Cheng, Jiaxiang
Ma, Bing
Zheng, Tianxiang
Lu, Qinhlin
author_facet Xu, Ruojun
Kai, Yu
Ren, Xuhua
Cheng, Jiaxiang
Ma, Bing
Zheng, Tianxiang
Lu, Qinhlin
contents Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has shown promising results in aligning generative outputs with human preferences by distinguishing between chosen and rejected samples. However, a critical limitation of DPO is likelihood displacement, where the probabilities of chosen samples paradoxically decrease during training, undermining the quality of generation. Although this issue has been investigated in autoregressive models, its impact within diffusion-based models remains largely unexplored. This gap leads to suboptimal performance in tasks involving video generation. To address this, we conduct a formal analysis of DPO loss through updating policy within the diffusion framework, which describes how the updating of specific training samples influences the model's predictions on other samples. Using this tool, we identify two main failure modes: (1) Optimization Conflict, which arises from small reward margins between chosen and rejected samples, and (2) Suboptimal Maximization, caused by large reward margins. Informed by these insights, we introduce a novel solution named Policy-Guided DPO (PG-DPO), combining Adaptive Rejection Scaling (ARS) and Implicit Preference Regularization (IPR) to effectively mitigate likelihood displacement. Experiments show that PG-DPO outperforms existing methods in both quantitative metrics and qualitative evaluations, offering a robust solution for improving preference alignment in video generation tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_19049
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Beyond Reward Margin: Rethinking and Resolving Likelihood Displacement in Diffusion Models via Video Generation
Xu, Ruojun
Kai, Yu
Ren, Xuhua
Cheng, Jiaxiang
Ma, Bing
Zheng, Tianxiang
Lu, Qinhlin
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has shown promising results in aligning generative outputs with human preferences by distinguishing between chosen and rejected samples. However, a critical limitation of DPO is likelihood displacement, where the probabilities of chosen samples paradoxically decrease during training, undermining the quality of generation. Although this issue has been investigated in autoregressive models, its impact within diffusion-based models remains largely unexplored. This gap leads to suboptimal performance in tasks involving video generation. To address this, we conduct a formal analysis of DPO loss through updating policy within the diffusion framework, which describes how the updating of specific training samples influences the model's predictions on other samples. Using this tool, we identify two main failure modes: (1) Optimization Conflict, which arises from small reward margins between chosen and rejected samples, and (2) Suboptimal Maximization, caused by large reward margins. Informed by these insights, we introduce a novel solution named Policy-Guided DPO (PG-DPO), combining Adaptive Rejection Scaling (ARS) and Implicit Preference Regularization (IPR) to effectively mitigate likelihood displacement. Experiments show that PG-DPO outperforms existing methods in both quantitative metrics and qualitative evaluations, offering a robust solution for improving preference alignment in video generation tasks.
title Beyond Reward Margin: Rethinking and Resolving Likelihood Displacement in Diffusion Models via Video Generation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19049