ORPO Trainer ↗

Overview#

Odds Ratio Preference Optimization (ORPO) was introduced in ORPO: Monolithic Preference Optimization without Reference Model by Jiwoo Hong, Noah Lee, and James Thorne.

The abstract from the paper is the following:

While recent preference alignment algorithms for language models have demonstrated promising results, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) remains imperative for achieving successful convergence. In this paper, we study the crucial role of SFT within the context of preference alignment, emphasizing that a minor penalty for the disfavored generation style is sufficient for preference-aligned SFT. Building on this foundation, we introduce a straightforward and innovative reference model-free monolithic odds ratio preference optimization algorithm, ORPO, eliminating the necessity for an additional preference alignment phase. We demonstrate, both empirically and theoretically, that the odds ratio is a sensible choice for contrasting favored and disfavored styles during SFT across the diverse sizes from 125M to 7B. Specifically, fine-tuning Phi-2 (2.7B), Llama-2 (7B), and Mistral (7B) with ORPO on the UltraFeedback alone surpasses the performance of state-of-the-art language models with more than 7B and 13B parameters: achieving up to 12.20% on AlpacaEval_{2.0} (Figure 1), 66.19% on IFEval (instruction-level loose, Table 6), and 7.32 in MT-Bench (Figure 12). We release code and model checkpoints for Mistral-ORPO-alpha (7B) and Mistral-ORPO-beta (7B).

It studies the crucial role of SFT within the context of preference alignment. Using preference data the method posits that a minor penalty for the disfavored generation together with a strong adaption signal to the chosen response via a simple log odds ratio term appended to the NLL loss is sufficient for preference-aligned SFT.

Thus ORPO is a reference model-free preference optimization algorithm eliminating the necessity for an additional preference alignment phase thus saving compute and memory.

The official code can be found in xfactlab/orpo.

This post-training method was contributed by Kashif Rasul, Lewis Tunstall and Alvaro Bartolome.

Quick start#

This example demonstrates how to train a model using the ORPO method. We use the Qwen 0.5B model as the base model. We use the preference data from the UltraFeedback dataset. You can view the data in the dataset here: