DPO Kernels: A Semantically-Aware, Kernel-Enhanced, and Divergence-Rich Paradigm for Direct Preference Optimization

🤗 Upvotes: 5 | cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL, 68T45

Authors:
Amitava Das, Suranjana Trivedy, Danush Khanna, Rajarshi Roy, Gurpreet Singh, Basab Ghosh, Yaswanth Narsupalli, Vinija Jain, Vasu Sharma, Aishwarya Naresh Reganti, Aman Chadha

Title:
DPO Kernels: A Semantically-Aware, Kernel-Enhanced, and Divergence-Rich Paradigm for Direct Preference Optimization

Arxiv:
http://arxiv.org/abs/2501.03271v2

Abstract:
The rapid rise of large language models (LLMs) has unlocked many applications but also underscores the challenge of aligning them with diverse values and preferences. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is central to alignment but constrained by fixed divergences and limited feature transformations. We propose DPO-Kernels, which integrates kernel methods to address these issues through four key contributions: (i) Kernelized Representations with polynomial, RBF, Mahalanobis, and spectral kernels for richer transformations, plus a hybrid loss combining embedding-based and probability-based objectives; (ii) Divergence Alternatives (Jensen-Shannon, Hellinger, Renyi, Bhattacharyya, Wasserstein, and f-divergences) for greater stability; (iii) Data-Driven Selection metrics that automatically choose the best kernel-divergence pair; and (iv) a Hierarchical Mixture of Kernels for both local precision and global modeling. Evaluations on 12 datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in factuality, safety, reasoning, and instruction following. Grounded in Heavy-Tailed Self-Regularization, DPO-Kernels maintains robust generalization for LLMs, offering a comprehensive resource for further alignment research.

What is Daily Paper Cast?

We update every weekday to discuss highest-voted papers from Huggingface Daily Paper (https://huggingface.co/papers). Both the podcast scripts and audio are generated by AI. Feedback and suggestions are welcome! Email us: [e-mail]

Creator:
Jingwen Liang, 3D ML, https://www.linkedin.com/in/jingwen-liang/
Gengyu Wang, LLM ML, http://wanggengyu.com

Listen on:
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/21nrhmdaA8qoBiH8q03NXL
Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/daily-paper-cast/id1777620236

Cover Image by Kawen Kuang https://kawen.art