Robust Preference Optimization through Reward Model Distillation

Language model (LM) post-training (or alignment) involves maximizing a reward function that is derived from preference annotations. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a popular offline alignment method that trains a policy directly on preference data without the need to train a reward model or apply reinforcement learning. However, the empirical evidence suggests that DPO typically assigns implicit rewards that overfit, and trend towards infinite magnitude. This frequently leads to degenerate policies, sometimes causing even the probabilities of the preferred generations to go to zero. In this work, we analyze this phenomenon and use distillation to get a better proxy for the true preference distribution over generation pairs: we train the LM such that its induced implicit reward, i.e., the scaled log-likelihood ratio of the model to the reference model, matches an explicit reward model trained on the preference data. Moreover, to account for uncertainty in the reward model we are distilling from, we optimize against a family of reward models that, as a whole, is likely to include at least one reasonable proxy for the preference distribution. Our results show that distilling from such a family of reward models leads to improved robustness to distribution shift in preference annotations, while preserving the simple supervised nature of DPO.

Paper

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Reviewer wkMh6/10 · confidence 4/52024-07-11

Summary

Based on the analysis of the shortcomings of DPO (Section 2.3), the authors proposed a simple reward distillation approach (Section 3.1) to align language models and a pessimistic variant (Section 3.2). These approaches outperform the vanilla DPO.

Strengths

- The analysis in Section 2.3 extends the result in the IPO paper [23]. - The reward distillation approach is simple and natural, giving good empirical results.

Weaknesses

I think that this paper is technically well done. However, it has a limited application scope. The authors aim to address the shortcomings of offline alignment methods like DPO, while maintaining an offline approach. However, online alignment methods such as PPO or Reinforce-style algorithms naturally alleviate these offline learning issues. This raises a question: Given the authors' findings on the limitations of offline alignment, why not adopt an online alignment method like PPO directly? Admittedly, the distilled DPO method and its pessimistic variants are less complex than PPO. However, these proposed offline variants introduce additional complexities to vanilla DPO by requiring separate reward models and separate training phases. This makes them more akin to online methods. Furthermore, the experiment section lacks a comparison against online method baselines, leaving it unclear if the distilled-DPO variants offer a better performance--compute tradeoff compared to vanilla online methods like PPO. To be clear, the paper offers intriguing insights. However, these techniques seem niche. They benefit those who prefer robust generalization in preference optimization without using online data, an assumption not very well communicated in the paper. In my opinion, there are ways to increase the method's applicability. While the proposed distillation approaches are positioned as offline methods, to my understanding, they are also applicable to an online regime. For example, in Equation (7), instead of sampling $(x, y_1, y_2)$ from an offline dataset, as the authors currently do, we can sample $x$ from an offline dataset and then sample $(y_1, y_2)$ from the model in training. The learned models, in this way, are directly comparable to those learned via online alignment methods like PPO, but in a simpler approach than these online baselines. If the authors could demonstrate that these models outperform PPO or require less complexity in training, they could expand the method's application scope and impact.

Questions

As mentioned in the "Weaknesses" section above, does it make sense to apply reward distillation to online policy optimization? Does this compare favorably with online policy optimization baselines, like PPO?

Rating

6

Confidence

4

Soundness

3

Presentation

3

Contribution

2

Limitations

See "Weaknesses" section above.

Reviewer wkMh2024-08-12

Response

I appreciate the authors for their response. I especially appreciate the authors' discussion regarding their method's computational complexity: > The additional overhead of reward distillation is small, and rewards for the training data can be computed offline (once) ahead of time. This allows training to be nearly identical to the standard variants, modulo the structure of the data that is fed in. This is true regardless of the size of the policy that is trained, or its hyperparameters: the reward data is generated once, for a finite (and completely parallelizable) dataset. We therefore respectfully, but strongly, disagree that the proposed method is more akin to online methods, where the reward models score generations sampled online from an ever-shifting distribution. This corrects my misunderstanding, leading me to adjust my score. I suggest the authors include a similar discussion like this in the paper, emphasizing the overhead is minimal. The paper currently lacks a comparison between offline methods (like DPO and the authors' approach) and online alignment variants (such as PPO), which I think is a limitation. I understand that incorporating such a comparison within the short rebuttal period might be unrealistic, but I think including it could significantly enhance the paper's impact. Indeed, the core argument of the paper is to address the idiosyncrasies of implicit reward behavior. Since online methods like PPO don't involve implicit rewards, and as the authors noted, "explicit reward models [in offline methods] can easily be regularized and understood," a comparison would seem beneficial. As a reader, I anticipate this comparison. An imperfect analogy might be a paper proposing a vision transformer model robust to shift-translation but neglecting to compare it with a conventional CNN, which is likely to possess this property by design.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-13

We thank the reviewer for thoroughly reading our author response, and for adjusting their score. We also appreciate and will consider the additional suggestions for improving its contribution. We will certainly incorporate a clear discussion of the computational benefits of our approach in a revision to the main paper.

Reviewer y8pX6/10 · confidence 3/52024-07-11

Summary

This paper addresses the limitations of DPO in LM alignment by proposing a reward model distillation approach. DPO, while efficient, often leads to overconfident and degenerate policies due to limited preference annotations. The authors introduce a method that trains LMs to match the distribution from a reward model, improving robustness and performance, particularly in biased preference datasets. Their approach also includes a pessimistic extension to handle uncertainty in reward models.

Strengths

This paper makes a considerable theoretical contribution by addressing the critical issue of degeneration in DPO, a problem of significant concern in the community. The authors present a well-structured and clearly written analysis that helps in understanding the overfitting commonly observed with the DPO. The proposed method of reward model distillation is both theoretically sound and intuitive, offering a robust solution that potentially improves upon traditional DPO methods. I appreciate this approach and its theoretical support.

Weaknesses

The main concern about this paper is the evaluation. As discussed in Section 2.3, DPO can shift nearly all probability mass to responses that never appear in the training set, also called OOD extrapolation in other papers. This issue arises when there are few annotations per instance (x, y1, y2). Therefore, it is expected that the authors should demonstrate how their proposed approach mitigates this problem, maybe by presenting the log-probabilities of the winning and losing responses. Specifically, the log-probability margin between winning and losing responses should not keep increasing (I assume this is true?). Additionally, I can see the paper presents results showing robustness against distribution shifts in preference data. But what is the factor that makes the proposed algorithm learn the policy whose underlying preference distribution closer to the true preference distribution in biased setting? I would be willing to increase my score if these concerns are solved.

Questions

Refer to weaknesses.

Rating

6

Confidence

3

Soundness

3

Presentation

3

Contribution

3

Limitations

I have no concerns about the limitations.

Reviewer yoUT6/10 · confidence 4/52024-07-17

Summary

The authors discuss and give formal results on the limitations of DPO that have been observed in practice, and investigate reward model objectives for 1) distilling reward differences into the generator (eq. 7), and 2) pessimistic "minimax" distillation over a family of reward models, to mitigate these limitations. The theoretical equivalance of the "forward" and "reverse" pessimistic formulations (eq. 8 and 9) of the standard RLHF objective (eq. 1) is shown, and an approximate pessimistic objective (eq. 10) with a minimum over distillation losses for the reward model family considered in a Langrangian term. Results on TL;DR preference data that is biased to varying degrees to prefer long responses (Figure 2) shows good results for distilled models generally, and that pessimistic optimization over a family of reward models optimized for varying response lengths improves results in irregular settings (i.e. when shorter responses are preferred).

Strengths

- A well written, insightful paper, with well formulated, novel objectives for preference optimization.

Weaknesses

- The results, as the authors acknowledge, are currently quite limited. These methods should really be tested on at least one additional preference task, and for results utilizing multiple models, pessimism should be compared with other basic ensembling strategies. - The gamma parameter is annealed during training, suggesting that the setting is important and perhaps sensitive. Some ablations and discussion around this seems prudent.

Questions

See above sections.

Rating

6

Confidence

4

Soundness

3

Presentation

3

Contribution

3

Limitations

Yes.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-09

Thanks again for your hard work in reviewing our paper! We hope that you've had a chance to read our reply to your comments. If they've addressed your concerns, then we hope that the reviewer can consider increasing the score. If not, please let us know if you have any further questions or concerns. We are committed to ensuring that our contributions are clearly communicated.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-09

Thanks again for your hard work in reviewing our paper! We hope that you've had a chance to read our reply to your comments. If they've addressed your concerns, then we hope that the reviewer can consider increasing the score. If not, please let us know if you have any further questions or concerns. We are committed to ensuring that our contributions are clearly communicated.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-09

Thanks again for your hard work in reviewing our paper! We hope that you've had a chance to read our reply to your comments. If they've addressed your concerns, then we hope that the reviewer can consider increasing the score. If not, please let us know if you have any further questions or concerns. We are committed to ensuring that our contributions are clearly communicated.

Reviewer y8pX2024-08-11

Thank you to the authors for their thorough rebuttal. My major concerns have been addressed, and with the inclusion of these results in the paper, I believe this paper offers valuable insights to our community. I have accordingly raised my score.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-14

A quick thank you to the reviewer for reading our author response, and for adjusting their score! We are happy to see that the reviewer believes that our work offers valuable insights to the community. We will be sure to include the new results presented here in the paper.

Program Chairsdecision2024-09-25

Decision

Reject

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