AI summary · arXiv: 2501.01821v1 · cs.AI

SDPO: Segment-Level Direct Preference Optimization for Social Agents

Aobo Kong, Wentao Ma, Shiwan Zhao, Yongbin Li, Yuchuan Wu, Ke Wang, Xiaoqian Liu, Qicheng Li,
and 2 more authorsYong Qin, Fei Huang
Original paper Submitted to arXiv on 03 Jan. 2025 License: NONEXCLUSIVE-DISTRIB 1.0

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  • Authors address limitations of existing methods in optimizing multi-turn agent behavior
  • Introduction of Segment-Level Direct Preference Optimization (SDPO) to optimize multi-turn agent behavior by focusing on specific key segments within interactions
  • Comparison between turn-level and session-level methods in existing DPO-based approaches for multi-turn interactions
  • Demonstrated superior performance of SDPO-tuned agents over existing DPO-based methods and proprietary LLMs like GPT-4o on the SOTOPIA benchmark

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, , , , In their paper titled "SDPO: Segment-Level Direct Preference Optimization for Social Agents," authors Aobo Kong, Wentao Ma, Shiwan Zhao, Yongbin Li, Yuchuan Wu, Ke Wang, Xiaoqian Liu, Qicheng Li, Yong Qin, and Fei Huang address the limitations of existing methods in optimizing multi-turn agent behavior. They highlight that while social agents powered by large language models (LLMs) can simulate human social behaviors to a certain extent, they struggle with handling complex goal-oriented social dialogues effectively. To tackle this challenge, the authors introduce Segment-Level Direct Preference Optimization (SDPO), which focuses on specific key segments within interactions to optimize multi-turn agent behavior while minimizing training noise. The study emphasizes that Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has shown effectiveness in aligning LLM behavior with human preferences across various agent tasks. However, existing DPO-based approaches for multi-turn interactions are categorized into turn-level and session-level methods. The turn-level method is criticized for being overly fine-grained as it solely concentrates on individual turns, while session-level methods are deemed too coarse-grained and often introduce training noise. Through evaluations on the SOTOPIA benchmark, the authors demonstrate that SDPO-tuned agents consistently outperform both existing DPO-based methods and proprietary LLMs like GPT-4o. This underscores the potential of SDPO in advancing the social intelligence of LLM-based agents. The researchers have made their code and data available at https://github.com/AlibabaResearch/DAMO-ConvAI/tree/main/SDPO for further exploration and implementation by interested parties. Overall, this study sheds light on a novel approach in optimizing multi-turn agent behavior through segment-level direct preference optimization, offering promising implications for enhancing the capabilities of social agents powered by large language models in handling complex goal-oriented social dialogues more effectively.

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