trl_md_files/kto_trainer.mdx

# KTO Trainer

TRL supports the Kahneman-Tversky Optimization (KTO) Trainer for aligning language models with binary feedback data (e.g., upvote/downvote), as described in the [paper](https://huggingface.co/papers/2402.01306) by Kawin Ethayarajh, Winnie Xu, Niklas Muennighoff, Dan Jurafsky, and Douwe Kiela.
For a full example have a look at  [`examples/scripts/kto.py`].

Depending on how good your base model is, you may or may not need to do SFT before KTO.
This is different from standard RLHF and DPO, which always require SFT.

## Expected dataset format

The KTO trainer expects a very specific format for the dataset as it does not require pairwise preferences. Since the model will be trained to directly optimize examples that consist of a prompt, model completion, and a label to indicate whether the completion is "good" or "bad", we expect a dataset with the following columns:

- `prompt`
- `completion`
- `label`

for example:

```
kto_dataset_dict = {
    "prompt": [
        "Hey, hello",
        "How are you",
        "What is your name?",
        "What is your name?",
        "Which is the best programming language?",
        "Which is the best programming language?",
        "Which is the best programming language?",
    ],
    "completion": [
        "hi nice to meet you",
        "leave me alone",
        "I don't have a name",
        "My name is Mary",
        "Python",
        "C++",
        "Java",
    ],
    "label": [
        True,
        False,
        False,
        True,
        True,
        False,
        False,
    ],
}
```

where the `prompt` contains the context inputs, `completion` contains the corresponding responses and `label` contains the corresponding flag that indicates if the generated completion is desired (`True`) or undesired (`False`).
A prompt can have multiple responses and this is reflected in the entries being repeated in the dictionary's value arrays. It is required that the dataset contains at least one desirable and one undesirable completion.


## Expected model format
The KTO trainer expects a model of `AutoModelForCausalLM`, compared to PPO that expects `AutoModelForCausalLMWithValueHead` for the value function.

## Using the `KTOTrainer`

For a detailed example have a look at the `examples/scripts/kto.py` script. At a high level we need to initialize the `KTOTrainer` with a `model` we wish to train and a reference `ref_model` which we will use to calculate the implicit rewards of the preferred and rejected response. 

The `beta` refers to the hyperparameter of the implicit reward, and the dataset contains the 3 entries listed above. Note that the `model` and `ref_model` need to have the same architecture (ie decoder only or encoder-decoder).

The `desirable_weight` and `undesirable_weight` refer to the weights placed on the losses for desirable/positive and undesirable/negative examples.
By default, they are both 1. However, if you have more of one or the other, then you should upweight the less common type such that the ratio of (`desirable_weight` * number of positives) to (`undesirable_weight` * number of negatives) is in the range 1:1 to 4:3.

```py
training_args = KTOConfig(
    beta=0.1,
    desirable_weight=1.0,
    undesirable_weight=1.0,
)

kto_trainer = KTOTrainer(
    model,
    ref_model,
    args=training_args,
    train_dataset=train_dataset,
    tokenizer=tokenizer,
)
```
After this one can then call:

```py
kto_trainer.train()
```

### For Mixture of Experts Models: Enabling the auxiliary loss

MOEs are the most efficient if the load is about equally distributed between experts.  
To ensure that we train MOEs similarly during preference-tuning, it is beneficial to add the auxiliary loss from the load balancer to the final loss.  

This option is enabled by setting `output_router_logits=True` in the model config (e.g. MixtralConfig).  
To scale how much the auxiliary loss contributes to the total loss, use the hyperparameter `router_aux_loss_coef=...` (default: 0.001).

## KTOTrainer

[[autodoc]] KTOTrainer

## KTOConfig

[[autodoc]] KTOConfig