Improving Context-Aware Preference Modeling for Language Models

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Hauptverfasser: Pitis, Silviu, Xiao, Ziang, Roux, Nicolas Le, Sordoni, Alessandro
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Pitis, Silviu
Xiao, Ziang
Roux, Nicolas Le
Sordoni, Alessandro
author_facet Pitis, Silviu
Xiao, Ziang
Roux, Nicolas Le
Sordoni, Alessandro
contents While finetuning language models from pairwise preferences has proven remarkably effective, the underspecified nature of natural language presents critical challenges. Direct preference feedback is uninterpretable, difficult to provide where multidimensional criteria may apply, and often inconsistent, either because it is based on incomplete instructions or provided by diverse principals. To address these challenges, we consider the two-step preference modeling procedure that first resolves the under-specification by selecting a context, and then evaluates preference with respect to the chosen context. We decompose reward modeling error according to these two steps, which suggests that supervising context in addition to context-specific preference may be a viable approach to aligning models with diverse human preferences. For this to work, the ability of models to evaluate context-specific preference is critical. To this end, we contribute context-conditioned preference datasets and accompanying experiments that investigate the ability of language models to evaluate context-specific preference. We use our datasets to (1) show that existing preference models benefit from, but fail to fully consider, added context, (2) finetune a context-aware reward model with context-specific performance exceeding that of GPT-4 and Llama 3 70B on tested datasets, and (3) investigate the value of context-aware preference modeling.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_14916
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Improving Context-Aware Preference Modeling for Language Models
Pitis, Silviu
Xiao, Ziang
Roux, Nicolas Le
Sordoni, Alessandro
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
While finetuning language models from pairwise preferences has proven remarkably effective, the underspecified nature of natural language presents critical challenges. Direct preference feedback is uninterpretable, difficult to provide where multidimensional criteria may apply, and often inconsistent, either because it is based on incomplete instructions or provided by diverse principals. To address these challenges, we consider the two-step preference modeling procedure that first resolves the under-specification by selecting a context, and then evaluates preference with respect to the chosen context. We decompose reward modeling error according to these two steps, which suggests that supervising context in addition to context-specific preference may be a viable approach to aligning models with diverse human preferences. For this to work, the ability of models to evaluate context-specific preference is critical. To this end, we contribute context-conditioned preference datasets and accompanying experiments that investigate the ability of language models to evaluate context-specific preference. We use our datasets to (1) show that existing preference models benefit from, but fail to fully consider, added context, (2) finetune a context-aware reward model with context-specific performance exceeding that of GPT-4 and Llama 3 70B on tested datasets, and (3) investigate the value of context-aware preference modeling.
title Improving Context-Aware Preference Modeling for Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.14916