When Scores Conflict with Preferences: Pre-Alignment Diagnosis and Adaptive Correction of Constraint Drift in DPO

Abstract

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is increasingly used in settings where pairwise preferences coexist with pointwise criteria such as response length, answer correctness, or safety scores. When the two disagree, standard DPO treats pairs whose preferred output scores worse on the pointwise criterion (conflict pairs) in the same way as the remaining (matching) pairs. We characterize a systematic failure mode, constraint drift: for sufficiently small updates, conflict pairs tend to increase constraint cost while matching pairs tend to repair it, and the net change depends on their balance. This balance yields a closed-form pre-alignment diagnostic, $\rho^{*}_{\mathrm{eq}}$, computable from dataset statistics, that indicates whether a dataset is self-correcting or requires intervention. Building on this diagnostic, we propose Conflict-aware DPO (CoDPO), which down-weights conflict pairs with a strength set from $\rho^{*}_{\mathrm{eq}}$ rather than tuned, and adds an adaptive margin shift that addresses residual drift during training. Empirically, drift grows monotonically with conflict exposure on the conflict-dominated domains, and the intervention decision given by $\rho^{*}_{\mathrm{eq}}$ matches the observed drift on every domain, including one that it identifies as self-correcting. On all four domains of the main comparison, CoDPO reduces drift while largely preserving the preference learning of vanilla DPO. Compared with hard filtering and recent constrained and multi-objective baselines, CoDPO also achieves a more favorable drift-preference trade-off.