Peering Through Preferences: Unraveling Feedback Acquisition for Aligning Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Bansal, Hritik, Dang, John, Grover, Aditya
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2023
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866929234570641408
author Bansal, Hritik
Dang, John
Grover, Aditya
author_facet Bansal, Hritik
Dang, John
Grover, Aditya
contents Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values and intents critically involves the use of human or AI feedback. While dense feedback annotations are expensive to acquire and integrate, sparse feedback presents a structural design choice between ratings (e.g., score Response A on a scale of 1-7) and rankings (e.g., is Response A better than Response B?). In this work, we analyze the effect of this design choice for the alignment and evaluation of LLMs. We uncover an inconsistency problem wherein the preferences inferred from ratings and rankings significantly disagree 60% for both human and AI annotators. Our subsequent analysis identifies various facets of annotator biases that explain this phenomena, such as human annotators would rate denser responses higher while preferring accuracy during pairwise judgments. To our surprise, we also observe that the choice of feedback protocol also has a significant effect on the evaluation of aligned LLMs. In particular, we find that LLMs that leverage rankings data for alignment (say model X) are preferred over those that leverage ratings data (say model Y), with a rank-based evaluation protocol (is X/Y's response better than reference response?) but not with a rating-based evaluation protocol (score Rank X/Y's response on a scale of 1-7). Our findings thus shed light on critical gaps in methods for evaluating the real-world utility of language models and their strong dependence on the feedback protocol used for alignment. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/Hritikbansal/sparse_feedback.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2308_15812
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Peering Through Preferences: Unraveling Feedback Acquisition for Aligning Large Language Models
Bansal, Hritik
Dang, John
Grover, Aditya
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values and intents critically involves the use of human or AI feedback. While dense feedback annotations are expensive to acquire and integrate, sparse feedback presents a structural design choice between ratings (e.g., score Response A on a scale of 1-7) and rankings (e.g., is Response A better than Response B?). In this work, we analyze the effect of this design choice for the alignment and evaluation of LLMs. We uncover an inconsistency problem wherein the preferences inferred from ratings and rankings significantly disagree 60% for both human and AI annotators. Our subsequent analysis identifies various facets of annotator biases that explain this phenomena, such as human annotators would rate denser responses higher while preferring accuracy during pairwise judgments. To our surprise, we also observe that the choice of feedback protocol also has a significant effect on the evaluation of aligned LLMs. In particular, we find that LLMs that leverage rankings data for alignment (say model X) are preferred over those that leverage ratings data (say model Y), with a rank-based evaluation protocol (is X/Y's response better than reference response?) but not with a rating-based evaluation protocol (score Rank X/Y's response on a scale of 1-7). Our findings thus shed light on critical gaps in methods for evaluating the real-world utility of language models and their strong dependence on the feedback protocol used for alignment. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/Hritikbansal/sparse_feedback.
title Peering Through Preferences: Unraveling Feedback Acquisition for Aligning Large Language Models
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.15812