What Matters in Data for DPO?
This work addresses a fundamental problem in LLM alignment by identifying key data characteristics for DPO, offering practical insights for dataset construction, though it is incremental as it builds on existing DPO methods.
The study systematically investigates how preference data distribution affects Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) performance, finding that the quality of chosen responses is crucial while rejected responses have limited impact, with experiments confirming that improving chosen responses consistently boosts performance.
Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a simple and effective approach for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences, bypassing the need for a learned reward model. Despite its growing adoption, a fundamental question remains open: what characteristics of preference data are most critical for DPO performance? In this work, we provide a systematic study of how preference data distribution influences DPO, from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. We show that the quality of chosen responses plays a dominant role in optimizing the DPO objective, while the quality of rejected responses may have relatively limited impact. Our theoretical analysis characterizes the optimal response distribution under DPO and reveals how contrastiveness between responses helps primarily by improving the chosen samples. We further study an online DPO setting and show it effectively reduces to supervised fine-tuning on the chosen responses. Extensive experiments across diverse tasks confirm our findings: improving the quality of chosen responses consistently boosts performance regardless of the quality of the rejected responses. We also investigate the benefit of mixing the on-policy data. Our results interpret the mechanism behind some widely adopted strategies and offer practical insights for constructing high-impact preference datasets for LLM alignment.