Large Language Models (LLMs) have become increasingly popular due to their ability to process and generate natural language. However, as they are trained on massive datasets of text, LLMs can inherit harmful biases and produce outputs that are not aligned with human values. This paper studies two main approaches to LLM alignment: Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) and contrastive learning-based methods like Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). By analyzing the stability and robustness of RLHF and DPO, we propose MPO (Mixed Preference Optimization), a novel method that mitigates the weaknesses of both approaches. Specifically, we propose a two-stage training procedure: first train DPO on an easy dataset, and then perform RLHF on a difficult set with DPO model being the reference model. Here, the easy and difficult sets are constructed by a well-trained reward model that splits response pairs into those with large gaps of reward (easy), and those with small gaps (difficult). The first stage allows us to obtain a relatively optimal policy (LLM) model quickly, whereas the second stage refines LLM with online RLHF, thus mitigating the distribution shift issue associated with DPO. Experiments are conducted on two public alignment datasets, namely HH-RLHF and TLDR, demonstrating the effectiveness of MPO, both in terms of GPT4 and human evaluation.

本文研究了大规模语言模型（LLMs）对齐的两种主要方法：强化学习与人类反馈（RLHF）以及基于对比学习的直接偏好优化（DPO）。通过分析RLHF和DPO的稳定性和鲁棒性，我们提出了一种新方法MPO（混合偏好优化），该方法减轻了两种方法的缺点。我们提出了一个两阶段的训练过程：首先在一个简单的数据集上对DPO进行训练，然后在一个具有DPO模型作为参考模型的困难集上进行RLHF。实验在两个公开的对齐数据集上进行，即HH-RLHF和TLDR，展示了MPO的有效性，无论是在GPT4上还是人类评估上。

混合偏好优化：通过数据选择和更好的参考模型进行强化学习