arXiv:2609.06893cs.CLcs.LG2026-09

提出DP3O算法,让离线对齐模型性能接近迭代方法。

Towards Bridging the Gap Between Offline and Iterative Alignment via Preference Distillation

论文配图:Towards Bridging the Gap Between Offline and Iterative Alignment via Preference Distillation
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 用辅助大模型先学显式偏好,再蒸馏到主模型
  • 在多个任务上超越现有离线方法,训练快42%
  • 适合追求高效且高性能离线对齐的开发者

直接偏好优化(DPO)因其简单、高效和隐式建模人类偏好而成为大语言模型对齐的有前景的离线方法。有趣的是,迭代扩展版本在学术基准上表现更优,引发两个关键问题:(i) 为何迭代方法通常优于离线方法?(ii) 其优势能否融入离线对齐?通过受控实验,我们发现迭代过程中引入的显式偏好模型是其优越性的关键。基于此洞察,我们提出蒸馏偏好概率策略优化(DP3O),一种高效且有效的离线对齐算法。DP3O首先使用辅助大模型学习显式偏好模型,再将其知识蒸馏至策略优化中。理论上,显式偏好建模具有更好的估计误差控制,且DP3O通过方差减少实现了比硬标签DPO更紧的泛化界。实证上,我们在多种基于对话和下游任务中评估了DP3O,结果表明其性能优于现有最优离线方法,达到与迭代DPO相当水平,并将训练时间减少约42%,证明其有效性和高效性。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Direct preference optimization DPO is a promising offline approach for aligning large language models (LLMs) due to its simplicity, computational efficiency, and implicit modeling of human preferences. Interestingly, iterative extensions of DPO have achieved stronger performance on academic benchmarks, raising two key questions: (i) Why do iterative methods generally outperform offline ones? (ii) Can their advantages be incorporated into offline alignment? To answer the first question, our controlled experiments reveal that the explicit preference model, additionally introduced in the iterative procedure, is a key factor behind its superiority over offline methods. This insight leads us to answer the second question affirmatively and propose Distilled Preference Probability Policy Optimization (DP3O), an effective and efficient offline alignment algorithm. DP3O first learns an explicit preference model using a helper class of LLMs and then distills its knowledge into policy optimization. Theoretically, we show that explicit preference modeling admits better estimation error control than implicit formulations, and that DP3O achieves a tighter generalization bound than hard-label DPO through variance reduction. Empirically, we evaluate DP3O on a wide range of chat-based and downstream tasks and show that it outperforms state-of-the-art offline methods, achieves performance comparable to iterative DPO, and reduces training time by about $42\%$, demonstrating both its effectiveness and efficiency.

大模型对齐偏好优化离线训练知识蒸馏

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