On the steerability of large language models toward data-driven personas

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Li, Junyi, Mehrabi, Ninareh, Peris, Charith, Goyal, Palash, Chang, Kai-Wei, Galstyan, Aram, Zemel, Richard, Gupta, Rahul
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866913296383213568
author Li, Junyi
Mehrabi, Ninareh
Peris, Charith
Goyal, Palash
Chang, Kai-Wei
Galstyan, Aram
Zemel, Richard
Gupta, Rahul
author_facet Li, Junyi
Mehrabi, Ninareh
Peris, Charith
Goyal, Palash
Chang, Kai-Wei
Galstyan, Aram
Zemel, Richard
Gupta, Rahul
contents Large language models (LLMs) are known to generate biased responses where the opinions of certain groups and populations are underrepresented. Here, we present a novel approach to achieve controllable generation of specific viewpoints using LLMs, that can be leveraged to produce multiple perspectives and to reflect the diverse opinions. Moving beyond the traditional reliance on demographics like age, gender, or party affiliation, we introduce a data-driven notion of persona grounded in collaborative filtering, which is defined as either a single individual or a cohort of individuals manifesting similar views across specific inquiries. As individuals in the same demographic group may have different personas, our data-driven persona definition allows for a more nuanced understanding of different (latent) social groups present in the population. In addition to this, we also explore an efficient method to steer LLMs toward the personas that we define. We show that our data-driven personas significantly enhance model steerability, with improvements of between $57\%-77\%$ over our best performing baselines.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2311_04978
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On the steerability of large language models toward data-driven personas
Li, Junyi
Mehrabi, Ninareh
Peris, Charith
Goyal, Palash
Chang, Kai-Wei
Galstyan, Aram
Zemel, Richard
Gupta, Rahul
Computation and Language
Large language models (LLMs) are known to generate biased responses where the opinions of certain groups and populations are underrepresented. Here, we present a novel approach to achieve controllable generation of specific viewpoints using LLMs, that can be leveraged to produce multiple perspectives and to reflect the diverse opinions. Moving beyond the traditional reliance on demographics like age, gender, or party affiliation, we introduce a data-driven notion of persona grounded in collaborative filtering, which is defined as either a single individual or a cohort of individuals manifesting similar views across specific inquiries. As individuals in the same demographic group may have different personas, our data-driven persona definition allows for a more nuanced understanding of different (latent) social groups present in the population. In addition to this, we also explore an efficient method to steer LLMs toward the personas that we define. We show that our data-driven personas significantly enhance model steerability, with improvements of between $57\%-77\%$ over our best performing baselines.
title On the steerability of large language models toward data-driven personas
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.04978