DPO-Shift: Shifting the Distribution of Direct Preference Optimization
Authors: name: Xiliang Yang; name: Feng Jiang; name: Qianen Zhang; name: Lei Zhao; name: Xiao Li
Published: 2025-02-11 14:49:44

Abstract: Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and its variants have become
increasingly popular for aligning language models with human preferences. These
methods aim to teach models to better distinguish between chosen (or preferred)
and rejected (or dispreferred) responses. However, prior research has
identified that the probability of chosen responses often decreases during
training, and this phenomenon is known as likelihood displacement. To tackle
this challenge, in this work we introduce \method to controllably shift the
distribution of the chosen probability. Then, we show that \method exhibits a
fundamental trade-off between improving the chosen probability and sacrificing
the reward margin, as supported by both theoretical analysis and experimental
validation. Furthermore, we demonstrate the superiority of \method over DPO on
downstream tasks such as MT-Bench and a designed win rate experiment. We
believe this study shows that the likelihood displacement issue of DPO can be
effectively mitigated with a simple, theoretically grounded solution. Our code
is available at https://github.com/Meaquadddd/DPO-Shift.