让语言模型通过偏好图学习更复杂的排序关系,提升对齐效果。
Beyond Pairs: Your Language Model is Secretly Optimizing a Preference Graph

- 用偏好图代替成对比较,捕捉响应间的传递性关系
- 在推理和编程任务中优于传统方法,性能显著提升
- 适合有多个生成结果的对齐场景,尤其擅长复杂任务
直接偏好优化(DPO)通过成对偏好比较对齐语言模型,是人类反馈强化学习的简洁有效替代。但在实际应用中,每个提示通常产生多个生成结果,形成丰富的偏好结构,而传统的成对DPO无法充分利用这些信息。将多轮输出压缩为独立成对样本会丢失传递性,引入冗余或冲突的监督信号,导致优化不稳定。本文提出图直接偏好优化(GraphDPO),一种基于滚动结果排名构建的有向无环偏好图的原理性扩展。GraphDPO将支配关系编码为边,采用受Plackett–Luce启发的图结构目标函数,聚合邻域内的监督信号,同时保证传递性,并退化为标准DPO作为特例。为处理离散或稀疏信号,引入等价类构造:具有相同偏好的响应构成图层,层内边贡献零损失,避免虚假梯度。尽管利用完整图结构,GraphDPO仍保持每提示线性复杂度,通过高效的log-sum-exp聚合实现。此外,通过插入已验证解作为主导节点并采用退火调度,可选择性引入真实答案锚定,稳定初期训练并逐步放松人工监督。在推理与程序合成任务上的实验表明,其表现优于现有方法,证明图结构偏好建模是一种可扩展、鲁棒的对齐新范式。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) aligns language models using pairwise preference comparisons, offering a simple and effective alternative to Reinforcement Learning (RL) from human feedback. However, in many practical settings, training data consists of multiple rollouts per prompt, inducing rich preference structure that pairwise DPO fails to exploit. Collapsing such data into independent pairs discards transitivity, introduces redundant or conflicting supervision, and can lead to unstable optimization. We propose Graph Direct Preference Optimization (GraphDPO), a principled generalization of DPO that operates over directed acyclic preference graphs induced by rollout rankings. GraphDPO encodes dominance relations as edges and optimizes a graph-structured Plackett--Luce-inspired objective that aggregates supervision over graph neighborhoods, enforcing transitivity while recovering standard DPO as a special case. To handle discrete or sparse signals, we introduce an equivalence-class construction where responses with identical preferences form graph layers, and intra-layer edges contribute zero loss, preventing spurious gradients. Despite leveraging full graph structure, GraphDPO maintains linear per-prompt complexity via efficient log-sum-exp aggregation. We further incorporate optional ground-truth anchoring by inserting verified solutions as dominant nodes and applying an annealed schedule that stabilizes early training while gradually relaxing oracle supervision. Experiments on reasoning and program synthesis tasks demonstrate superior performance, suggesting that graph-structured preference modeling is a scalable and robust alternative to pairwise and listwise alignment objectives.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。