The Shape of the DPO Hyperparameter Landscape: What to Measure, How It Moves with Scale, and When Not to Transfer It

Abstract

Direct preference optimisation (DPO) is widely used for language model post-training, but its performance depends strongly on the choice of its hyperparameters, such as the learning rate and the reference-policy regularisation parameter $β$. To better understand the DPO hyperparameter landscape, we conduct extensive experiments using a dense hyperparameter grid across different model scales from the same family. This allows us to analyse how the optimal DPO hyperparameters evolve with model size and the number of update steps, with intermediate checkpoints providing an inexpensive signal to accelerate the hyperparameter optimisation process. Furthermore, by evaluating our models on both static and dynamic benchmarks, we identify which benchmarks provide the strongest signal for hyperparameter selection. Finally, we investigate how different state-of-the-art hyperparameter optimisation strategies perform in this setting. Our experiments show that the optimal learning rate varies with model size and that hyperparameters are not transferable across training datasets. We also find that validation loss is a poor proxy for hyperparameter optimisation, as hyperparameters that minimize validation loss only weakly correlate with optimal hyperparameters for downstream benchmarks. Therefore, DPO hyperparameters need to be tuned specifically for the target model, dataset, and evaluation objective. We also show that short candidate training runs can substantially reduce the cost of this selection. We release all our training configurations and evaluation results to support reproducible analysis of selection quality and training cost.