arXiv:2510.05534cs.CL2025-10ACL

难提示会拖累大模型自对弈优化,用简单提示训练效果更好。

Revisiting Self-Play Preference Optimization: On the Role of Prompt Difficulty

  • 用响应平均奖励衡量提示难度,发现难提示效果差。
  • 仅用30%最简单提示训练,性能优于全量提示。
  • 模型越大,难易提示差距越小,提示难度与模型能力相关。

自对弈偏好优化已成为对齐大语言模型的重要范式。其核心流程包括模型生成响应、奖励模型评估并选择优劣响应,再通过直接偏好优化(DPO)进行训练。然而,提示的作用长期被忽视。本文以提示的响应平均奖励作为难度代理指标,发现:难提示下的自对弈优化性能显著低于易提示;将难提示纳入训练不仅无法提升整体表现,反而导致轻微退化;随着提示难度降低,优化性能呈上升趋势。此外,模型容量越大,难易提示间的性能差距越小,表明提示难度与模型能力存在交互。基于此,我们探索缓解难提示负面影响的方法,结果表明:仅使用最简单提示的30%,即可在AlpacaEval~2和Arena-Hard上实现更优自对弈性能。文中还记录了失败尝试与经验教训。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Self-play preference optimization has emerged as a prominent paradigm for aligning large language models (LLMs). It typically involves a language model to generate on-policy responses for prompts and a reward model (RM) to guide the selection of chosen and rejected responses, which can be further trained with direct preference optimization (DPO). However, the role of prompts remains underexplored, despite being a core component in this pipeline. In this work, we investigate how prompts of varying difficulty influence self-play preference optimization. We use the mean reward of sampled responses of a prompt as a proxy for its difficulty. We first find that difficult prompts exhibit substantially inferior self-play optimization performance compared to easy prompts for language models. Moreover, incorporating difficult prompts into training fails to enhance overall performance and, in fact, leads to slight degradation compared to training on easy prompts alone. Third, there is a clear upward trend in optimization performance as prompt difficulty decreases. We also observe that the performance gap between difficult and easy prompts tends to close as the model capacity increases, suggesting that prompt difficulty interacts with the model capacity. Building on these findings, we explore strategies to mitigate the adversary effect of difficult prompts on final performance. We demonstrate that only training on a small portion (30%) of the easiest prompts improves overall self-play performance on AlpacaEval~2 and Arena-Hard. We also report failed attempts and lessons learned.

自对弈提示工程大模型对齐偏好优化

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