Title: SafeDPO: A Simple Approach to Direct Preference Optimization with Enhanced Safety
Primary area: alignment, fairness, safety, privacy, and societal considerations
Keywords: Safety Alignment, LLM Fine-tuning, Preferences, Large Language Models, AI Safety

Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, balancing both helpfulness and safety has become a central challenge. A natural approach is to incorporate safety constraints into Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), where recent studies have shown promising progress. However, these methods often rely on auxiliary networks or multi-stage pipelines, thereby increasing complexity. In this work, we revisit the safety alignment objective itself and demonstrate that it admits a closed-form solution, yielding a theoretically grounded and provably equivalent reformulation that enables a direct and tractable optimization procedure. Building on this insight, we propose SafeDPO, a lightweight method derived from this formulation, which preserves the optimality of the underlying safety-constrained objective while requiring only one additional hyperparameter and minimal modifications to existing preference-based training methods. At the same time, it eliminates the need for reward models, cost models, and online sampling. Despite its simplicity, SafeDPO achieves comparable or superior results to state-of-the-art safety alignment methods in both theoretical soundness and empirical performance. Experiments on the PKU-SafeRLHF-30K benchmark show that SafeDPO consistently improves safety while maintaining competitive helpfulness. Ablation studies further show that the additional hyperparameter provides a flexible mechanism to enhance safety without altering the theoretical optimum, and confirm that SafeDPO scales reliably to LLMs with up to 13B parameters. Overall, our results highlight that a simple, theory-driven objective can provide a lightweight yet effective solution for safety alignment in practice.

TL;DR: This work introduces a simple yet principled approach for directly optimizing the safety alignment objective during policy learning