SimPER: A Minimalist Approach to Preference Alignment without Hyperparameters (2502.00883v4)

Abstract: Existing preference optimization objectives for LLM alignment require additional hyperparameters that must be extensively tuned to achieve optimal performance, increasing both the complexity and time required for fine-tuning LLMs. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective hyperparameter-free preference optimization algorithm for alignment. We observe that promising performance can be achieved simply by optimizing inverse perplexity, which is calculated as the inverse of the exponentiated average log-likelihood of the chosen and rejected responses in the preference dataset. The resulting simple learning objective, SimPER, is easy to implement and eliminates the need for expensive hyperparameter tuning and a reference model, making it both computationally and memory efficient. Extensive experiments on widely used real-world benchmarks, including MT-Bench, AlpacaEval 2, and 10 key benchmarks of the Open LLM Leaderboard with 5 base models, demonstrate that SimPER consistently and significantly outperforms existing approaches-even without any hyperparameters or a reference model . For example, despite its simplicity, SimPER outperforms state-of-the-art methods by up to 5.7 points on AlpacaEval 2 and achieves the highest average ranking across 10 benchmarks on the Open LLM Leaderboard. The source code for SimPER is publicly available at: https://github.com/tengxiao1/SimPER.