Masking Frequent Tokens Sharpens Direct Preference Optimization
Harshvardhan Saini, Samyak Jha, Yiming Tang, Dianbo Liu
Abstract
Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) aligns language models by optimizing over sequence-level sums of token-wise implicit reward differences. However, we identify a pervasive pathology in this formulation: a disproportionately small subset of high-frequency token types dominates cumulative sequence scores while appearing symmetrically across both preferred and dispreferred responses. Specifically, under canonical Qwen tokenization on Anthropic HH-RLHF, merely 69 token types account for $55.1\%$ of all response tokens and $85.9\%$ of within-pair shared token mass, exhibiting substantially lower preference-side specificity than the remaining vocabulary. This symmetric ubiquity induces gradient entanglement and dilutes the discriminative preference signal propagated through the objective. To resolve this issue, we introduce \emph{Anisotropic DPO} (\textsf{ADPO}) and its canonical realization, \emph{Frequency-Hard DPO}. Using a fixed, label-agnostic vocabulary mask, our method zeroes the implicit reward contribution of high-frequency response tokens while assigning unit weight to informative positions, thereby suppressing gradient interference without modifying preference pairs, discarding context, or introducing learned parameters. Here, \emph{anisotropy} designates non-uniform token-level objective weighting rather than representational geometry. Extensive empirical evaluations on AlpacaEval, MT-Bench, and Arena-Hard demonstrate that Frequency-Hard DPO consistently outperforms standard DPO across Qwen-2.5-7B-Instruct and Llama-3-8B-Instruct, establishing that selectively masking shared high-frequency tokens offers an effective, zero-overhead mechanism for robust preference alignment.