Black-Box Prompt Optimization: Aligning Large Language Models without Model Training

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Cheng, Jiale, Liu, Xiao, Zheng, Kehan, Ke, Pei, Wang, Hongning, Dong, Yuxiao, Tang, Jie, Huang, Minlie
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2023
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author Cheng, Jiale
Liu, Xiao
Zheng, Kehan
Ke, Pei
Wang, Hongning
Dong, Yuxiao
Tang, Jie
Huang, Minlie
author_facet Cheng, Jiale
Liu, Xiao
Zheng, Kehan
Ke, Pei
Wang, Hongning
Dong, Yuxiao
Tang, Jie
Huang, Minlie
contents Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive success in various applications. However, these models are often not well aligned with human intents, which calls for additional treatments on them; that is, the alignment problem. To make LLMs better follow user instructions, existing alignment methods primarily focus on further training them. However, the extra training of LLMs is usually expensive in terms of GPU computing; even worse, some LLMs are not accessible for user-demanded training, such as GPTs. In this work, we take a different perspective -- Black-Box Prompt Optimization (BPO) -- to perform alignments. The idea is to optimize user prompts to suit LLMs' input understanding, so as to best realize users' intents without updating LLMs' parameters. BPO leverages human preferences to optimize prompts, thus making it superior to LLM (e.g., ChatGPT) as a prompt engineer. Moreover, BPO is model-agnostic, and the empirical results demonstrate that the BPO-aligned ChatGPT yields a 22% increase in the win rate against its original version and 10% for GPT-4. Notably, the BPO-aligned LLMs can outperform the same models aligned by PPO and DPO, and it also brings additional performance gains when combining BPO with PPO or DPO. Code and datasets are released at https://github.com/thu-coai/BPO.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2311_04155
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Black-Box Prompt Optimization: Aligning Large Language Models without Model Training
Cheng, Jiale
Liu, Xiao
Zheng, Kehan
Ke, Pei
Wang, Hongning
Dong, Yuxiao
Tang, Jie
Huang, Minlie
Computation and Language
Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive success in various applications. However, these models are often not well aligned with human intents, which calls for additional treatments on them; that is, the alignment problem. To make LLMs better follow user instructions, existing alignment methods primarily focus on further training them. However, the extra training of LLMs is usually expensive in terms of GPU computing; even worse, some LLMs are not accessible for user-demanded training, such as GPTs. In this work, we take a different perspective -- Black-Box Prompt Optimization (BPO) -- to perform alignments. The idea is to optimize user prompts to suit LLMs' input understanding, so as to best realize users' intents without updating LLMs' parameters. BPO leverages human preferences to optimize prompts, thus making it superior to LLM (e.g., ChatGPT) as a prompt engineer. Moreover, BPO is model-agnostic, and the empirical results demonstrate that the BPO-aligned ChatGPT yields a 22% increase in the win rate against its original version and 10% for GPT-4. Notably, the BPO-aligned LLMs can outperform the same models aligned by PPO and DPO, and it also brings additional performance gains when combining BPO with PPO or DPO. Code and datasets are released at https://github.com/thu-coai/BPO.
title Black-Box Prompt Optimization: Aligning Large Language Models without Model Training
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.04155