COLING 2025main0 citations

MPPO: Multi Pair-wise Preference Optimization for LLMs with Arbitrary Negative Samples

Shuo Xie, Fangzhi Zhu, Jiahui Wang, Lulu Wen, Wei Dai, Xiaowei Chen, Junxiong Zhu, Kai Zhou

Abstract

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human feedback is crucial for their development. Existing preference optimization methods such as DPO and KTO, while improved based on Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), are inherently derived from PPO, requiring a reference model that adds GPU memory resources and relies heavily on abundant preference data. Meanwhile, current preference optimization research mainly targets single-question scenarios with two replies, neglecting optimization with multiple replies, which leads to a waste of data in the application. This study introduces the MPPO algorithm, which leverages the average likelihood of model responses to fit the reward function and maximizes the utilization of preference data. Through a comparison of Point-wise, Pair-wise, and List-wise implementations, we found that the Pair-wise approach achieves the best performance, significantly enhancing the quality of model responses. Experimental results demonstrate MPPO’s outstanding performance across various benchmarks. On MT-Bench, MPPO outperforms DPO, ORPO, and SimPO. Notably, on Arena-Hard, MPPO surpasses DPO and ORPO by substantial margins. These achievements underscore the remarkable advantages of MPPO in preference optimization tasks.

BibTeX
@inproceedings{xie-etal-2025-mppo,
    title = "{MPPO}: Multi Pair-wise Preference Optimization for {LLM}s with Arbitrary Negative Samples",
    author = "Xie, Shuo  and
      Zhu, Fangzhi  and
      Wang, Jiahui  and
      Wen, Lulu  and
      Dai, Wei  and
      Chen, Xiaowei  and
      Zhu, Junxiong  and
      Zhou, Kai  and
      Zheng, Bo",
    editor = "Rambow, Owen  and
      Wanner, Leo  and
      Apidianaki, Marianna  and
      Al-Khalifa, Hend  and
      Eugenio, Barbara Di  and
      Schockaert, Steven",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics",
    month = jan,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Abu Dhabi, UAE",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.104/",
    pages = "1545--1554"
}
MPPO: Multi Pair-wise Preference Optimization for LLMs with Arbitrary Negative Samples · COLING 2025