Disentangling Optimization Scale from Preference Scale in DPO

Abstract

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a widely used objective for aligning language models from preference data, with the coefficient $β$ commonly interpreted as controlling the KL constraint to a reference policy. We show that $β$ entangles two distinct roles: it governs the effective inverse preference-noise scale and simultaneously rescales the optimization dynamics, coupling this scale with the effective step size. As a consequence, at a fixed learning rate the achieved policy deviation is non-monotone in $β$: it vanishes in a dead zone at small $β$, reaches a peak at an intermediate value, and decreases again for larger $β$. Moreover, standard DPO loss values are not comparable across $β$: runs with nearly identical loss curves can differ several-fold in KL divergence from the reference model. This entanglement obscures the role of $β$, increases sensitivity to hyperparameter choices, and complicates learning-rate scheduling. We propose a centered-softplus reformulation that is argmin-equivalent to DPO for $β>0$, while making the inverse preference-noise-scale and learning-rate effects explicit and independently tunable. The normalized centered-softplus objective also admits a continuous $β\to0$ endpoint that reduces to a linear preference-margin objective.