Token-weighted Direct Preference Optimization with Attention 文章

ArXiv CS.CL2026-05-27NEWSen作者: Chengyu Huang, Zhuohang Li, Sheng-Yen Chou, Claire Cardie

摘要

arXiv:2605.21883v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) aligns Large Language Models with human preferences without the need for a separate reward model. However, DPO treats all tokens in responses equally, neglecting the differing importance of individual tokens. Existing token-level PO methods compute the token weights using either token-position-based heuristic functions or probability estimates given by a separately trained model, which lacks robustness and incurs extra training cost. In contrast, we propose Token-weighted DPO (TwDPO) -- a novel training objective grounded on token-weighted RL -- and AttentionPO -- an instantiation of TwDPO that uses attention from the LLM itself to estimate token weights. AttentionPO prompts the LLM to serve as a pairwise judge and check where the model attends when comparing the responses.