Sample Efficient Preference Alignment in LLMs via Active Exploration

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Mehta, Viraj, Belakaria, Syrine, Das, Vikramjeet, Neopane, Ojash, Dai, Yijia, Bogunovic, Ilija, Engelhardt, Barbara, Ermon, Stefano, Schneider, Jeff, Neiswanger, Willie
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2023
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author Mehta, Viraj
Belakaria, Syrine
Das, Vikramjeet
Neopane, Ojash
Dai, Yijia
Bogunovic, Ilija
Engelhardt, Barbara
Ermon, Stefano
Schneider, Jeff
Neiswanger, Willie
author_facet Mehta, Viraj
Belakaria, Syrine
Das, Vikramjeet
Neopane, Ojash
Dai, Yijia
Bogunovic, Ilija
Engelhardt, Barbara
Ermon, Stefano
Schneider, Jeff
Neiswanger, Willie
contents Preference-based feedback is important for many applications in machine learning where evaluation of a reward function is not feasible. Notable recent examples arise in preference alignment for large language models, including in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and direct preference optimization (DPO). For many applications of preference alignment, the cost of acquiring human feedback can be substantial. In this work, we take advantage of the fact that one can often choose contexts at which to obtain human feedback to most efficiently identify a good policy, and formalize the setting as an active contextual dueling bandit problem. We propose an active exploration algorithm to efficiently select the data and provide theoretical proof that it has a polynomial worst-case regret bound. We extend the setting and methodology for practical use in preference alignment of large language models. We provide two extensions, an online and an offline approach. Our method outperforms the baselines with limited samples of human preferences on several language models and four real-world datasets including two new datasets that we contribute to the literature.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2312_00267
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Sample Efficient Preference Alignment in LLMs via Active Exploration
Mehta, Viraj
Belakaria, Syrine
Das, Vikramjeet
Neopane, Ojash
Dai, Yijia
Bogunovic, Ilija
Engelhardt, Barbara
Ermon, Stefano
Schneider, Jeff
Neiswanger, Willie
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Preference-based feedback is important for many applications in machine learning where evaluation of a reward function is not feasible. Notable recent examples arise in preference alignment for large language models, including in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and direct preference optimization (DPO). For many applications of preference alignment, the cost of acquiring human feedback can be substantial. In this work, we take advantage of the fact that one can often choose contexts at which to obtain human feedback to most efficiently identify a good policy, and formalize the setting as an active contextual dueling bandit problem. We propose an active exploration algorithm to efficiently select the data and provide theoretical proof that it has a polynomial worst-case regret bound. We extend the setting and methodology for practical use in preference alignment of large language models. We provide two extensions, an online and an offline approach. Our method outperforms the baselines with limited samples of human preferences on several language models and four real-world datasets including two new datasets that we contribute to the literature.
title Sample Efficient Preference Alignment in LLMs via Active Exploration
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.00267