From Instructions to Constraints: Language Model Alignment with Automatic Constraint Verification

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Wang, Fei, Shang, Chao, Jain, Sarthak, Wang, Shuai, Ning, Qiang, Min, Bonan, Castelli, Vittorio, Benajiba, Yassine, Roth, Dan
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866909133701120000
author Wang, Fei
Shang, Chao
Jain, Sarthak
Wang, Shuai
Ning, Qiang
Min, Bonan
Castelli, Vittorio
Benajiba, Yassine
Roth, Dan
author_facet Wang, Fei
Shang, Chao
Jain, Sarthak
Wang, Shuai
Ning, Qiang
Min, Bonan
Castelli, Vittorio
Benajiba, Yassine
Roth, Dan
contents User alignment is crucial for adapting general-purpose language models (LMs) to downstream tasks, but human annotations are often not available for all types of instructions, especially those with customized constraints. We observe that user instructions typically contain constraints. While assessing response quality in terms of the whole instruction is often costly, efficiently evaluating the satisfaction rate of constraints is feasible. We investigate common constraints in NLP tasks, categorize them into three classes based on the types of their arguments, and propose a unified framework, ACT (Aligning to ConsTraints), to automatically produce supervision signals for user alignment with constraints. Specifically, ACT uses constraint verifiers, which are typically easy to implement in practice, to compute constraint satisfaction rate (CSR) of each response. It samples multiple responses for each prompt and collect preference labels based on their CSR automatically. Subsequently, ACT adapts the LM to the target task through a ranking-based learning process. Experiments on fine-grained entity typing, abstractive summarization, and temporal question answering show that ACT is able to enhance LMs' capability to adhere to different classes of constraints, thereby improving task performance. Further experiments show that the constraint-following capabilities are transferable.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_06326
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle From Instructions to Constraints: Language Model Alignment with Automatic Constraint Verification
Wang, Fei
Shang, Chao
Jain, Sarthak
Wang, Shuai
Ning, Qiang
Min, Bonan
Castelli, Vittorio
Benajiba, Yassine
Roth, Dan
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
User alignment is crucial for adapting general-purpose language models (LMs) to downstream tasks, but human annotations are often not available for all types of instructions, especially those with customized constraints. We observe that user instructions typically contain constraints. While assessing response quality in terms of the whole instruction is often costly, efficiently evaluating the satisfaction rate of constraints is feasible. We investigate common constraints in NLP tasks, categorize them into three classes based on the types of their arguments, and propose a unified framework, ACT (Aligning to ConsTraints), to automatically produce supervision signals for user alignment with constraints. Specifically, ACT uses constraint verifiers, which are typically easy to implement in practice, to compute constraint satisfaction rate (CSR) of each response. It samples multiple responses for each prompt and collect preference labels based on their CSR automatically. Subsequently, ACT adapts the LM to the target task through a ranking-based learning process. Experiments on fine-grained entity typing, abstractive summarization, and temporal question answering show that ACT is able to enhance LMs' capability to adhere to different classes of constraints, thereby improving task performance. Further experiments show that the constraint-following capabilities are transferable.
title From Instructions to Constraints: Language Model Alignment with Automatic Constraint Verification
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.06326