Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Shen, Shannon Zejiang, Lang, Hunter, Wang, Bailin, Kim, Yoon, Sontag, David
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.03870
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Table of Contents:
  • We propose a method to teach multiple large language models (LLM) to collaborate by interleaving their generations at the token level. We model the decision of which LLM generates the next token as a latent variable. By optimizing the marginal likelihood of a training set under our latent variable model, the base LLM automatically learns when to generate itself and when to call on one of the ``assistant'' language models to generate, all without direct supervision. Token-level collaboration during decoding allows for a fusion of each model's expertise in a manner tailored to the specific task at hand. Our collaborative decoding is especially useful in cross-domain settings where a generalist base LLM learns to invoke domain expert models. On instruction-following, domain-specific QA, and reasoning tasks, we show that the performance of the joint system exceeds that of the individual models. Through qualitative analysis of the learned latent decisions, we show models trained with our method exhibit several interesting collaboration patterns, e.g., template-filling. Our code is available at https://github.com/clinicalml/co-llm.