Progress or Regress? Self-Improvement Reversal in Post-training

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Wu, Ting, Li, Xuefeng, Liu, Pengfei
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Wu, Ting
Li, Xuefeng
Liu, Pengfei
author_facet Wu, Ting
Li, Xuefeng
Liu, Pengfei
contents Self-improvement through post-training methods such as iterative preference learning has been acclaimed for enhancing the problem-solving capabilities (e.g., mathematical reasoning) of Large Language Models (LLMs) without human intervention. However, as exploration deepens, it becomes crucial to assess whether these improvements genuinely signify progress in solving more challenging problems or if they could lead to unintended regressions. To address this, we propose a comprehensive evaluative framework that goes beyond the superficial pass@1 metric to scrutinize the underlying enhancements of post-training paradigms for self-improvement. Through rigorous experimentation and analysis across diverse problem-solving tasks, the empirical results point out the phenomenon of \emph{self-improvement reversal}, where models showing improved performance across benchmarks will paradoxically exhibit declines in broader, essential capabilities, like output diversity and out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization. These findings indicate that current self-improvement practices through post-training are inadequate for equipping models to tackle more complex problems. Furthermore, they underscore the necessity of our critical evaluation metrics in discerning the \emph{progress or regress} dichotomy for self-improving LLMs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_05013
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Progress or Regress? Self-Improvement Reversal in Post-training
Wu, Ting
Li, Xuefeng
Liu, Pengfei
Computation and Language
Self-improvement through post-training methods such as iterative preference learning has been acclaimed for enhancing the problem-solving capabilities (e.g., mathematical reasoning) of Large Language Models (LLMs) without human intervention. However, as exploration deepens, it becomes crucial to assess whether these improvements genuinely signify progress in solving more challenging problems or if they could lead to unintended regressions. To address this, we propose a comprehensive evaluative framework that goes beyond the superficial pass@1 metric to scrutinize the underlying enhancements of post-training paradigms for self-improvement. Through rigorous experimentation and analysis across diverse problem-solving tasks, the empirical results point out the phenomenon of \emph{self-improvement reversal}, where models showing improved performance across benchmarks will paradoxically exhibit declines in broader, essential capabilities, like output diversity and out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization. These findings indicate that current self-improvement practices through post-training are inadequate for equipping models to tackle more complex problems. Furthermore, they underscore the necessity of our critical evaluation metrics in discerning the \emph{progress or regress} dichotomy for self-improving LLMs.
title Progress or Regress? Self-Improvement Reversal in Post-training
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.05013