Displacement-Resistant Extensions of DPO with Nonconvex $f$-Divergences

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission20397 Authors

Keywords: Alignment, Direct Preference Optimization, Reinforcement Learning, f-divergences

TL;DR: We characterize a broad class of functions f enabling DPO with f-divergence, and prove a simple condition on f that ensures displacement resistance.

Abstract: DPO and related algorithms align language models by directly optimizing the RLHF objective: find a policy that maximizes the Bradley-Terry reward while staying close to a reference policy through a KL divergence penalty. Previous work showed that this approach could be further generalized: the original problem remains tractable even if the KL divergence is replaced by a family of $f$-divergence with a convex generating function $f$. Our first contribution is to show that convexity of $f$ is not essential. Instead, we identify a more general condition, referred to as DPO-inducing, that precisely characterizes when the RLHF problem remains tractable. Our next contribution is to establish a second condition on $f$ that is necessary to prevent probability displacement, a known empirical phenomenon in which the probabilities of the winner and the loser responses approach zero. We refer to any $f$ that satisfies this condition as displacement-resistant. We finally focus on a specific DPO-inducing and displacement-resistant $f$, leading to our novel SquaredPO loss. Compared to DPO, this new loss offers stronger theoretical guarantees while performing competitively in practice.

Primary Area: reinforcement learning

Submission Number: 20397