AdaDPO: Self-Adaptive Direct Preference Optimization with Balanced Gradient Updates
About
DPO has become a widely adopted alternative to RLHF for aligning LLMs with human preferences, eliminating the need for a separate reward model or RL loop. Recent theoretical analysis uncovers an asymmetric gradient behavior in DPO: the loss suppresses dispreferred responses substantially faster than it promotes preferred ones, causing the model to learn to avoid bad answers rather than to generate good ones. We propose AdaDPO, a Self-Adaptive variant of the DPO algorithm that introduces per-preference-pair, stop-gradient-based coefficients derived directly from the policy model's generation probabilities, with the reference model's probabilities as an optional component. AdaDPO is constructed to enforce equality of gradient magnitudes between preferred and dispreferred probabilities; the practical implementation balances per-token gradients and applies a numerical clipping bound for stability, while retaining DPO's original hyperparameter structure. On Llama-3-8B-Instruct trained on UltraFeedback under a SimPO similar setup, AdaDPO consistently outperforms DPO on AlpacaEval 2: it achieves higher length-controlled win rates (LC) in 81% of hyperparameter combinations, attains the global best LC (48.3%) and raw win rate (46.1%), and enlarges the LC-over-WR margin in 88% of combinations, indicating effective mitigation of length bias. Additional analyses on KL divergence, reward margin, and reward accuracy confirm that AdaDPO rectifies the gradient imbalance and yields more efficient optimization. Because it operates purely at the loss level, AdaDPO can be dropped into existing preference-based alignment pipelines without changing data collection or model architectures. The method requires only a few lines of code, and the same self-adaptive principle generalizes to a broad family of pairwise contrastive preference losses including SimPO, R-DPO, IPO, CPO, and ORPO.