Learn Your Reference Model for Real Good Alignment
Authors: name: Alexey Gorbatovski, name: Boris Shaposhnikov, name: Alexey Malakhov, name: Nikita Surnachev, name: Yaroslav Aksenov, name: Ian Maksimov, name: Nikita Balagansky, name: Daniil Gavrilov
Organization: T-Tech

The complexity of the alignment problem stems from the fact that existing
methods are unstable. Researchers continuously invent various tricks to address
this shortcoming. For instance, in the fundamental Reinforcement Learning From
Human Feedback (RLHF) technique of Language Model alignment, in addition to
reward maximization, the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the trainable
policy and the SFT policy is minimized. This addition prevents the model from
being overfitted to the Reward Model (RM) and generating texts that are
out-of-domain for the RM. The Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) method
reformulates the optimization task of RLHF and eliminates the Reward Model
while tacitly maintaining the requirement for the policy to be close to the SFT
policy. In our paper, we argue that this implicit limitation in the DPO method
leads to sub-optimal results. We propose a new method called Trust Region DPO
(TR-DPO), which updates the reference policy during training. With such a
straightforward update, we demonstrate the effectiveness of TR-DPO against DPO
on the Anthropic HH and TLDR datasets. We show that TR-DPO outperforms DPO by
up to 19%, measured by automatic evaluation with GPT-4. The new alignment
approach that we propose allows us to improve the quality of models across
several parameters at once, such as coherence, correctness, level of detail,
helpfulness, and harmlessness.