Intuitive Fine-Tuning: Towards Simplifying Alignment into a Single Process

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Hua, Ermo, Qi, Biqing, Zhang, Kaiyan, Tian, Kai, Lv, Xingtai, Ding, Ning, Zhou, Bowen
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Hua, Ermo
Qi, Biqing
Zhang, Kaiyan
Tian, Kai
Lv, Xingtai
Ding, Ning
Zhou, Bowen
author_facet Hua, Ermo
Qi, Biqing
Zhang, Kaiyan
Tian, Kai
Lv, Xingtai
Ding, Ning
Zhou, Bowen
contents Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Preference Optimization (PO) are key processes for aligning Language Models (LMs) with human preferences post pre-training. While SFT excels in efficiency and PO in effectiveness, they are often combined sequentially without integrating their optimization objectives. This approach ignores the opportunities to bridge their paradigm gap and take the strengths from both. In this paper, we interpret SFT and PO with two sub-processes -- Preference Estimation and Transition Optimization -- defined at token level within the Markov Decision Process (MDP). This modeling shows that SFT is only a special case of PO with inferior estimation and optimization. PO estimates the model's preference by its entire generation, while SFT only scores model's subsequent predicted tokens based on prior tokens from ground truth answer. These priors deviates from model's distribution, hindering the preference estimation and transition optimization. Building on this view, we introduce Intuitive Fine-Tuning (IFT) to integrate SFT and PO into a single process. Through a temporal residual connection, IFT brings better estimation and optimization by capturing LMs' intuitive sense of its entire answers. But it solely relies on a single policy and the same volume of non-preference-labeled data as SFT. Our experiments show that IFT performs comparably or even superiorly to SFT and some typical PO methods across several tasks, particularly those require generation, reasoning, and fact-following abilities. An explainable Frozen Lake game further validates the effectiveness of IFT for getting competitive policy.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_11870
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Intuitive Fine-Tuning: Towards Simplifying Alignment into a Single Process
Hua, Ermo
Qi, Biqing
Zhang, Kaiyan
Tian, Kai
Lv, Xingtai
Ding, Ning
Zhou, Bowen
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Preference Optimization (PO) are key processes for aligning Language Models (LMs) with human preferences post pre-training. While SFT excels in efficiency and PO in effectiveness, they are often combined sequentially without integrating their optimization objectives. This approach ignores the opportunities to bridge their paradigm gap and take the strengths from both. In this paper, we interpret SFT and PO with two sub-processes -- Preference Estimation and Transition Optimization -- defined at token level within the Markov Decision Process (MDP). This modeling shows that SFT is only a special case of PO with inferior estimation and optimization. PO estimates the model's preference by its entire generation, while SFT only scores model's subsequent predicted tokens based on prior tokens from ground truth answer. These priors deviates from model's distribution, hindering the preference estimation and transition optimization. Building on this view, we introduce Intuitive Fine-Tuning (IFT) to integrate SFT and PO into a single process. Through a temporal residual connection, IFT brings better estimation and optimization by capturing LMs' intuitive sense of its entire answers. But it solely relies on a single policy and the same volume of non-preference-labeled data as SFT. Our experiments show that IFT performs comparably or even superiorly to SFT and some typical PO methods across several tasks, particularly those require generation, reasoning, and fact-following abilities. An explainable Frozen Lake game further validates the effectiveness of IFT for getting competitive policy.
title Intuitive Fine-Tuning: Towards Simplifying Alignment into a Single Process
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.11870