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Main Authors: Wang, Ziqi, Hou, Le, Lu, Tianjian, Wu, Yuexin, Li, Yunxuan, Yu, Hongkun, Ji, Heng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.00898
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author Wang, Ziqi
Hou, Le
Lu, Tianjian
Wu, Yuexin
Li, Yunxuan
Yu, Hongkun
Ji, Heng
author_facet Wang, Ziqi
Hou, Le
Lu, Tianjian
Wu, Yuexin
Li, Yunxuan
Yu, Hongkun
Ji, Heng
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in open-ended text generation tasks. However, the inherent open-ended nature of these tasks implies that there is always room for improvement in the quality of model responses. To address this challenge, various approaches have been proposed to enhance the performance of LLMs. There has been a growing focus on enabling LLMs to self-improve their response quality, thereby reducing the reliance on extensive human annotation efforts for collecting diverse and high-quality training data. Recently, prompting-based methods have been widely explored among self-improvement methods owing to their effectiveness, efficiency, and convenience. However, those methods usually require explicitly and thoroughly written rubrics as inputs to LLMs. It is expensive and challenging to manually derive and provide all necessary rubrics with a real-world complex goal for improvement (e.g., being more helpful and less harmful). To this end, we propose an ImPlicit Self-ImprovemenT (PIT) framework that implicitly learns the improvement goal from human preference data. PIT only requires preference data that are used to train reward models without extra human efforts. Specifically, we reformulate the training objective of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) -- instead of maximizing response quality for a given input, we maximize the quality gap of the response conditioned on a reference response. In this way, PIT is implicitly trained with the improvement goal of better aligning with human preferences. Experiments on two real-world datasets and one synthetic dataset show that our method significantly outperforms prompting-based methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2310_00898
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Enabling Language Models to Implicitly Learn Self-Improvement
Wang, Ziqi
Hou, Le
Lu, Tianjian
Wu, Yuexin
Li, Yunxuan
Yu, Hongkun
Ji, Heng
Computation and Language
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in open-ended text generation tasks. However, the inherent open-ended nature of these tasks implies that there is always room for improvement in the quality of model responses. To address this challenge, various approaches have been proposed to enhance the performance of LLMs. There has been a growing focus on enabling LLMs to self-improve their response quality, thereby reducing the reliance on extensive human annotation efforts for collecting diverse and high-quality training data. Recently, prompting-based methods have been widely explored among self-improvement methods owing to their effectiveness, efficiency, and convenience. However, those methods usually require explicitly and thoroughly written rubrics as inputs to LLMs. It is expensive and challenging to manually derive and provide all necessary rubrics with a real-world complex goal for improvement (e.g., being more helpful and less harmful). To this end, we propose an ImPlicit Self-ImprovemenT (PIT) framework that implicitly learns the improvement goal from human preference data. PIT only requires preference data that are used to train reward models without extra human efforts. Specifically, we reformulate the training objective of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) -- instead of maximizing response quality for a given input, we maximize the quality gap of the response conditioned on a reference response. In this way, PIT is implicitly trained with the improvement goal of better aligning with human preferences. Experiments on two real-world datasets and one synthetic dataset show that our method significantly outperforms prompting-based methods.
title Enabling Language Models to Implicitly Learn Self-Improvement
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.00898