On the Limited Generalization Capability of the Implicit Reward Model Induced by Direct Preference Optimization

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is an effective approach for aligning language models to human preferences. Central to RLHF is learning a reward function for scoring human preferences. Two main approaches for learning a reward model are 1) training an explicit reward model as in RLHF, and 2) using an implicit reward learned from preference data through methods such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). Prior work has shown that the implicit reward model of DPO can approximate a trained reward model, but it is unclear to what extent DPO can generalize to distribution…Apple Machine Learning Research