Getting More Juice Out of the SFT Data: Reward Learning from Human Demonstration Improves SFT for LLM Alignment

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Li, Jiaxiang, Zeng, Siliang, Wai, Hoi-To, Li, Chenliang, Garcia, Alfredo, Hong, Mingyi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866916456505016320
author Li, Jiaxiang
Zeng, Siliang
Wai, Hoi-To
Li, Chenliang
Garcia, Alfredo
Hong, Mingyi
author_facet Li, Jiaxiang
Zeng, Siliang
Wai, Hoi-To
Li, Chenliang
Garcia, Alfredo
Hong, Mingyi
contents Aligning human preference and value is an important requirement for contemporary foundation models. State-of-the-art techniques such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) often consist of two stages: 1) supervised fine-tuning (SFT), where the model is fine-tuned by learning from human demonstration data; 2) Preference learning, where preference data is used to learn a reward model, which is in turn used by a reinforcement learning (RL) step to fine-tune the model. Such reward model serves as a proxy to human preference, and it is critical to guide the RL step towards improving the model quality. In this work, we argue that the SFT stage significantly benefits from learning a reward model as well. Instead of using the human demonstration data directly via supervised learning, we propose to leverage an Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) technique to simultaneously build an reward model and a policy model. This approach leads to new SFT algorithms that are not only efficient to implement, but are robust to the presence of low-quality supervised learning data. Moreover, we discover a connection between the proposed IRL based approach, and a recent line of works called Self-Play Fine-tune (SPIN). Theoretically, we show that the proposed algorithms converge to the stationary solutions of the IRL problem. Empirically, we align 1B and 7B models using proposed methods and evaluate them on a reward benchmark model and the HuggingFace Open LLM Leaderboard. The proposed methods show significant performance improvement over existing SFT approaches. Our results indicate that it is beneficial to leverage reward learning throughout the entire alignment process.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_17888
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Getting More Juice Out of the SFT Data: Reward Learning from Human Demonstration Improves SFT for LLM Alignment
Li, Jiaxiang
Zeng, Siliang
Wai, Hoi-To
Li, Chenliang
Garcia, Alfredo
Hong, Mingyi
Artificial Intelligence
Aligning human preference and value is an important requirement for contemporary foundation models. State-of-the-art techniques such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) often consist of two stages: 1) supervised fine-tuning (SFT), where the model is fine-tuned by learning from human demonstration data; 2) Preference learning, where preference data is used to learn a reward model, which is in turn used by a reinforcement learning (RL) step to fine-tune the model. Such reward model serves as a proxy to human preference, and it is critical to guide the RL step towards improving the model quality. In this work, we argue that the SFT stage significantly benefits from learning a reward model as well. Instead of using the human demonstration data directly via supervised learning, we propose to leverage an Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) technique to simultaneously build an reward model and a policy model. This approach leads to new SFT algorithms that are not only efficient to implement, but are robust to the presence of low-quality supervised learning data. Moreover, we discover a connection between the proposed IRL based approach, and a recent line of works called Self-Play Fine-tune (SPIN). Theoretically, we show that the proposed algorithms converge to the stationary solutions of the IRL problem. Empirically, we align 1B and 7B models using proposed methods and evaluate them on a reward benchmark model and the HuggingFace Open LLM Leaderboard. The proposed methods show significant performance improvement over existing SFT approaches. Our results indicate that it is beneficial to leverage reward learning throughout the entire alignment process.
title Getting More Juice Out of the SFT Data: Reward Learning from Human Demonstration Improves SFT for LLM Alignment
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.17888