ADPO: Anchored Direct Preference Optimization

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is effective but brittle under annotator noise and distribution shift because it operates on hard, pairwise labels and only regularizes log-probability differences. We introduce Anchored Direct Preference Optimization (ADPO), a framework that extends preference learning to soft listwise supervision via reference anchoring. ADPO minimizes KL(q || softmax((s - s_ref) / tau_anc)), which (i) recovers supervised fine-tuning, knowledge distillation, maximum-entropy reinforcement learning, and DPO as special cases through suitable choices of target q, anchor policy, and temperature; (ii) induces an implicit trust region governed by the softmax Fisher metric, independent of the anchor; and (iii) supports stable dynamic-anchor updates. Empirically, we observe a task-dependent tradeoff: dynamic anchors improve online exploration under noise, while fixed anchors excel at offline distillation, achieving up to 170 to 5000 times reduction in student-teacher KL on our benchmarks.