Preference Alignment algorithms

RLHF (with PPO)

RLHF (Reinforcement learning from human feedback) with PPO (Proximal Policy Optimization) proposes ...

⚠️ TODO

DPO

With the introduction of DPO (Direct Preference Optimization), aligning LLMs has become easier, more efficient, and accessible to everyone! 🌟

In DPO, there is no reinforcement learning, and the model is directly optimized using the preference data.

⚠️ TODO : complete it

Insights:
1️⃣ DPO claims to offer a stable alternative to RL for fine-tuning language models. 💪
2️⃣ solves the challenge of aligning LLMs with human feedback using a single stage of policy training. 🎯
3️⃣ No need for a Reward Model ✨
4️⃣ DPO surpasses RL in controlling sentiment and improving response quality in summarization and single-turn dialogue tasks. 🎉

OAIF

OAIF (Online AI feedback) utilizes an LLM to provide online feedback, demonstrating superior performance over offline DPO and RLHF methods through human evaluation. 🤔
Online, in RLHF and RLAIF refers to the training data being acquired interactively and resampled from the LLM, rather than using fixed ones (offline). 👨‍🏫

Insights:
🎯 Annotator could be seen as a Reward Model
🔍 Quality of Annotator LLM is crucial for the result of online DPO
💡 Annotator LLM can be steered through prompting, e.g. “helpful and very short” or “always include code”
⚖️ Policy(trainable LLM) and Annotator LLM are different models
🔄 Offline DPO can overfit (with limited data?)
📊 Use OAIF if there is not enough offline data
⏱️ Behavior of LLM visibly changes after 2,000 steps or 256,000 samples.
🌐 Online DPO could be used to make the model more sensible to system prompts
🗨️ Could be used for multi-turn conversations when generating User prompts by LLM

Training process:
0️⃣ Select a fine-tuned LLM, which could be SFT or DPO, and prepare a dataset of prompts
1️⃣ Generate two responses for a batch of prompts
2️⃣ Use LLM as an Annotator to obtain “online” feedback scores response in both possible orders to avoid bias
3️⃣ Update the model using, e.g., DPO
Repeat 1️⃣ - 3️⃣

KTO

KTO (Kahneman & Tversky's Optimization) tries to simplify the optimization by using binary feedback on individual outputs. 👍🏻👎🏻 This is less complex and can be directly used on real-world data. 🌍

Insights:
👩‍🔬 Contextual AI ran 56 experiments using DPO, KTO, and PPO (RLHF)
🚀 KTO matches the performance of DPO & PPO
🦙 KTO showed better performance on bigger models (llama 1)
💡 Simplifies data requirements compared to DPO & RLHF
⚖️ Need a balanced binarized dataset (50% good 50% bad examples)

Training process:
1️⃣ Collect binary feedback data
2️⃣ Create a balanced (50/50) dataset out of triplets (prompt, response, feedback)
3️⃣ Apply KTO to a fine-tuned LLM using the dataset (2️⃣)
4️⃣ Evaluate outputs from the KTO model vs the old model using LLM as a judge or humans.

ORPO

ORPO (Odds Ratio Preference Optimization) proposes a method to train LLMs by combining SFT and Alignment into a new objective (loss function), achieving state of the art results.

Demo notebook:

Finetuning a base model with ORPO

Insights:
🧠 Reference model-free → memory friendly
🔄 Replaces SFT+DPO/PPO with 1 single method (ORPO)
🏆 ORPO Outperforms SFT, SFT+DPO on PHI-2, Llama 2, and Mistral

Training process:
1️⃣ Create a pairwise preference dataset (chosen/rejected), e.g. Argilla UltraFeedback.
2️⃣ Make sure the dataset doesn’t contain instances where the chosen and rejected responses are the same, or one is empty.
3️⃣ Select a pre-trained LLM (e.g., Llama-2, Mistral)
4️⃣ Train the Base model with ORPO objective on preference dataset
⚠️ No extra SFT step, directly applied to base model 🔥

PERL

PERL (Parameter Efficient Reinforcement Learning) looks to address the computational cost of RL by introducing LoRA for reward and policy model training.

⚠️ TODO: complete it

Insights:
🔹Performance equivalent to full tuning, sometimes better
🔹Requires updating as few as 0.1% parameters
🔹Reduces memory 50% and training time 90% for RM training
🔹Reduces memory 20% and training time 10% for RL Policy training