Finding the Sweet Spot: Preference Data Construction for Scaling
  Preference Optimization
Authors: name: Yao Xiao; name: Hai Ye; name: Linyao Chen; name: Hwee Tou Ng; name: Lidong Bing; name: Xiaoli Li; name: Roy Ka-wei Lee
Published: 2025-02-24 04:22:57

Abstract: Iterative data generation and model retraining are widely used to align large
language models (LLMs). It typically involves a policy model to generate
on-policy responses and a reward model to guide training data selection. Direct
Preference Optimization (DPO) further enhances this process by constructing
preference pairs of chosen and rejected responses. In this work, we aim to
scale up the number of on-policy samples via repeated random sampling to
improve alignment performance. Conventional practice selects the sample with
the highest reward as chosen and the lowest as rejected for DPO. However, our
experiments reveal that this strategy leads to a decline in performance
as the sample size increases. To address this, we investigate preference data
construction through the lens of underlying normal distribution of sample
rewards. We categorize the reward space into seven representative points and
systematically explore all 21 (C_7^2) pairwise combinations. Through
evaluations on four models using AlpacaEval 2, we find that selecting the
rejected response at reward position mu - 2sigma rather than the minimum
reward, is crucial for optimal performance. We finally introduce a scalable
preference data construction strategy that consistently enhances model
performance as the sample scale increases.