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Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model

A preference-based objective optimizes a language model directly, avoiding a separate reward-model training stage.

Rafael Rafailov et al.
2023-05 · Academic · Research paper
Source checked: 2026-10-24Credited institutions · Stanford University 🇺🇸 United States
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Why read this

Compare the objective and assumptions with an RLHF pipeline.

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Citation

@misc{rafailov2023direct,
  title = {Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model},
  author = {Rafael Rafailov and Archit Sharma and Eric Mitchell and Stefano Ermon and Christopher D. Manning and Chelsea Finn},
  year = {2023},
  eprint = {2305.18290},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  primaryClass = {cs.LG},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18290}
}

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