让模糊的偏好数据发挥价值,提升大模型对齐效果。
Small-Margin Preferences Still Matter-If You Train Them Right
- 按难易程度排序偏好数据,困难样本转用监督微调
- 在三个评测中均优于DPO,尤其在长度控制任务上提升显著
- 适合需要高质量对齐的模型训练场景
基于偏好优化的方法(如DPO)使用成对比较来对齐大语言模型,但其效果对偏好对的质量和难度高度敏感。常见做法是将小间距(模糊)对视为噪声并过滤掉。本文重新审视这一假设,发现配对难度与优化目标强烈相关:当使用基于偏好的损失时,困难对会扰乱训练并损害对齐效果;然而同样的对,在监督微调(SFT)下仍能提供有效监督信号。受此启发,我们提出MixDPO,一种简单有效的难度感知训练策略:(i) 将偏好数据按边际定义的难度从易到难排序(课程学习),(ii) 将困难对路由至SFT目标,而对简单对应用偏好损失。该混合设计可有效利用模糊对,避免偏好损失在低边际数据上引发优化失败。在三个LLM-裁判基准上,MixDPO一致优于DPO及其广泛使用的变体,尤其在AlpacaEval~2长度控制(LC)胜率上表现突出。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Preference optimization methods such as DPO align large language models (LLMs) using paired comparisons, but their effectiveness can be highly sensitive to the quality and difficulty of preference pairs. A common heuristic treats small-margin (ambiguous) pairs as noisy and filters them out. In this paper, we revisit this assumption and show that pair difficulty interacts strongly with the optimization objective: when trained with preference-based losses, difficult pairs can destabilize training and harm alignment, yet these same pairs still contain useful supervision signals when optimized with supervised fine-tuning (SFT). Motivated by this observation, we propose MixDPO, a simple yet effective difficulty-aware training strategy that (i) orders preference data from easy to hard (a curriculum over margin-defined difficulty), and (ii) routes difficult pairs to an SFT objective while applying a preference loss to easy pairs. This hybrid design provides a practical mechanism to leverage ambiguous pairs without incurring the optimization failures often associated with preference losses on low-margin data. Across three LLM-judge benchmarks, MixDPO consistently improves alignment over DPO and a range of widely-used variants, with particularly strong gains on AlpacaEval~2 length-controlled (LC) win rate.
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