DeAL: Decoding-time Alignment for Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Huang, James Y., Sengupta, Sailik, Bonadiman, Daniele, Lai, Yi-An, Gupta, Arshit, Pappas, Nikolaos, Mansour, Saab, Kirchhoff, Katrin, Roth, Dan
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Huang, James Y.
Sengupta, Sailik
Bonadiman, Daniele
Lai, Yi-An
Gupta, Arshit
Pappas, Nikolaos
Mansour, Saab
Kirchhoff, Katrin
Roth, Dan
author_facet Huang, James Y.
Sengupta, Sailik
Bonadiman, Daniele
Lai, Yi-An
Gupta, Arshit
Pappas, Nikolaos
Mansour, Saab
Kirchhoff, Katrin
Roth, Dan
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) are nowadays expected to generate content aligned with human preferences. Current work focuses on alignment at model training time, through techniques such as Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF). However, it is unclear if such methods are an effective choice to teach alignment objectives to the model. First, the inability to incorporate multiple, custom rewards and reliance on a model developer's view of universal and static principles are key limitations. Second, the reliability of such approaches is also questionable (e.g. susceptibility to jailbreaking even after safety training). To address these issues, we propose DeAL, a framework that allows the user to customize reward functions and enables Decoding-time Alignment of LLMs (DeAL). At its core, we view decoding as a heuristic-guided search process and facilitate the use of a wide variety of alignment objectives. Our experiments with programmatic constraints such as keyword and length constraints, and abstract objectives such as harmlessness and helpfulness, show that we can DeAL with fine-grained trade-offs and improve adherence to alignment objectives. Lastly, we demonstrate that DeAL is largely complementary to existing alignment strategies, and can be effectively paired with RLHF and prompting techniques to achieve better alignment.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_06147
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DeAL: Decoding-time Alignment for Large Language Models
Huang, James Y.
Sengupta, Sailik
Bonadiman, Daniele
Lai, Yi-An
Gupta, Arshit
Pappas, Nikolaos
Mansour, Saab
Kirchhoff, Katrin
Roth, Dan
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Large Language Models (LLMs) are nowadays expected to generate content aligned with human preferences. Current work focuses on alignment at model training time, through techniques such as Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF). However, it is unclear if such methods are an effective choice to teach alignment objectives to the model. First, the inability to incorporate multiple, custom rewards and reliance on a model developer's view of universal and static principles are key limitations. Second, the reliability of such approaches is also questionable (e.g. susceptibility to jailbreaking even after safety training). To address these issues, we propose DeAL, a framework that allows the user to customize reward functions and enables Decoding-time Alignment of LLMs (DeAL). At its core, we view decoding as a heuristic-guided search process and facilitate the use of a wide variety of alignment objectives. Our experiments with programmatic constraints such as keyword and length constraints, and abstract objectives such as harmlessness and helpfulness, show that we can DeAL with fine-grained trade-offs and improve adherence to alignment objectives. Lastly, we demonstrate that DeAL is largely complementary to existing alignment strategies, and can be effectively paired with RLHF and prompting techniques to achieve better alignment.
title DeAL: Decoding-time Alignment for Large Language Models
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.06147