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Main Authors: Ryan, Michael J., Held, William, Yang, Diyi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.15018
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author Ryan, Michael J.
Held, William
Yang, Diyi
author_facet Ryan, Michael J.
Held, William
Yang, Diyi
contents Before being deployed for user-facing applications, developers align Large Language Models (LLMs) to user preferences through a variety of procedures, such as Reinforcement Learning From Human Feedback (RLHF) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). Current evaluations of these procedures focus on benchmarks of instruction following, reasoning, and truthfulness. However, human preferences are not universal, and aligning to specific preference sets may have unintended effects. We explore how alignment impacts performance along three axes of global representation: English dialects, multilingualism, and opinions from and about countries worldwide. Our results show that current alignment procedures create disparities between English dialects and global opinions. We find alignment improves capabilities in several languages. We conclude by discussing design decisions that led to these unintended impacts and recommendations for more equitable preference tuning. We make our code and data publicly available on Github.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_15018
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Unintended Impacts of LLM Alignment on Global Representation
Ryan, Michael J.
Held, William
Yang, Diyi
Computation and Language
Computers and Society
Machine Learning
Before being deployed for user-facing applications, developers align Large Language Models (LLMs) to user preferences through a variety of procedures, such as Reinforcement Learning From Human Feedback (RLHF) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). Current evaluations of these procedures focus on benchmarks of instruction following, reasoning, and truthfulness. However, human preferences are not universal, and aligning to specific preference sets may have unintended effects. We explore how alignment impacts performance along three axes of global representation: English dialects, multilingualism, and opinions from and about countries worldwide. Our results show that current alignment procedures create disparities between English dialects and global opinions. We find alignment improves capabilities in several languages. We conclude by discussing design decisions that led to these unintended impacts and recommendations for more equitable preference tuning. We make our code and data publicly available on Github.
title Unintended Impacts of LLM Alignment on Global Representation
topic Computation and Language
Computers and Society
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.15018