DynamicPO: Dynamic Preference Optimization for Recommendation
Authors: Xingyu Hu, Kai Zhang, Jiancan Wu, Shuli Wang, Chi Wang, Wenshuai Chen, Yinhua Zhu, Haitao Wang, +2 more
Organizations: University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China · Shanghai Innovation Institute, Shanghai, China · Meituan, Chengdu, China
Abstract
In large language model (LLM)-based recommendation systems, direct preference optimization (DPO) effectively aligns recommendations with user preferences, requiring multi-negative objective functions to leverage abundant implicit-feedback negatives and sharpen preference boundaries. However, our empirical analyses reveal a counterintuitive phenomenon, preference optimization collapse, where increasing the number of negative samples can lead to performance degradation despite a continuously decreasing training loss. We further theoretically demonstrate that this collapse arises from gradient suppression, caused by the dominance of easily discriminable negatives over boundary-critical negatives that truly define user preference boundaries. As a result, boundary-relevant signals are under-optimized, weakening the model's decision boundary. Motivated by these observations, we propose DynamicPO (Dynamic Preference Optimization), a lightweight and plug-and-play framework comprising two adaptive mechanisms: Dynamic Boundary Negative Selection, which identifies and prioritizes informative negatives near the model's decision boundary, and Dual-Margin Dynamic beta Adjustment, which calibrates optimization strength per sample according to boundary ambiguity. Extensive experiments on three public datasets show that DynamicPO effectively prevents optimization collapse and improves recommendation accuracy on multi-negative preference optimization methods, with negligible computational overhead. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/xingyuHuxingyu/DynamicPO.
Offline preference optimization methods, such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), offer significant advantages in aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human values. However, achieving optimal performance with these methods typically involves additional hyperparameter tuning, resulting in substantial time overhead. Although prior work has proposed a range of improvements, these methods remain limited in effectiveness and have not fully eliminated reliance on hyperparameter tuning. In this work, we propose RMiPO, a lightweight and efficient framework for offline preference optimization. RMiPO leverages intrinsic Response-level Mutual information for Preference Optimization with hyperparameter modulation, dynamically decoupling preference contributions at negligible additional computational cost. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that RMiPO achieves consistently superior performance over existing methods while reducing training overhead by more than 15%. Our code is available at https://github.com/liavonpenn/rmipo.
Multi-negative preference optimization under the Plackett--Luce (PL) model extends Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) by leveraging comparative signals across one preferred and multiple rejected responses. However, optimizing over large negative pools is costly, and many candidates contribute redundant gradients due to their similar effects on policy updates. We introduce MASS-DPO, a multi-negative active sample selection method that derives a PL-specific Fisher-information objective for selecting compact, informative negative subsets within each prompt. The resulting log-determinant objective selects negatives that contribute complementary information for policy updates, yielding compact subsets that retain the full pool's information while reducing redundancy. In practice, this favors negatives whose gradients cover different update directions, reducing redundant signal from near-duplicate candidates while preserving the most useful training information. Across four benchmarks spanning recommendation and multiple-choice QA and three model families, MASS-DPO consistently exceeds or matches existing methods in accuracy, improves Recall/NDCG and margin-based optimization dynamics, and delivers stronger alignment with substantially fewer negatives.
Offline preference optimization has become a practical substitute for reinforcement learning from human feedback, but pairwise objectives such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and its variants use only the chosen and rejected responses stored in a static dataset. This leaves a useful signal unused: the response that the reference model itself would generate for the same prompt. We propose Direct Preference Optimization with Penalization (DPOP), a simple extension of DPO that augments the base preference loss with a gated penalty on reference-greedy responses. DPOP activates this penalty only when the current policy still assigns a lower likelihood to the preferred response than to the rejected response. On AlpacaEval 2.0, DPOP improves length-controlled win rate over DPO, SimPO, and AlphaDPO on both Llama-3-8b-it and Gemma-2-9b-it, achieving relative gains of 5.3% and 4.4% over baselines on the two models, respectively. Ablations further show that a SimNPO-style length-normalized penalty is stronger than NPO and token-level unlikelihood in this setting.