Can DPO Learn Diverse Human Values? A Theoretical Scaling Law

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Im, Shawn, Li, Sharon
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Im, Shawn
Li, Sharon
author_facet Im, Shawn
Li, Sharon
contents Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities but often struggle to align with human preferences, leading to harmful or undesirable outputs. Preference learning, which trains models to distinguish between preferred and non-preferred responses based on human feedback, has become a crucial component for ensuring that LLMs align with human values. An essential part of ensuring that LLMs are aligned for all people is accounting for a diverse set of values. This paper introduces a new theoretical framework to analyze how generalization scales with value diversity and sample quantity in models trained with direct preference optimization. Our framework rigorously assesses how well models generalize after a finite number of gradient steps, reflecting real-world LLM training practices. By analyzing the reward margin associated with each sample and its trajectory throughout training, we provide a bound on the generalization error that demonstrates the challenges of effectively learning a wide set of concepts or values. These insights are empirically validated on contemporary LLMs, underscoring the practical relevance of our theory.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_03459
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Can DPO Learn Diverse Human Values? A Theoretical Scaling Law
Im, Shawn
Li, Sharon
Machine Learning
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities but often struggle to align with human preferences, leading to harmful or undesirable outputs. Preference learning, which trains models to distinguish between preferred and non-preferred responses based on human feedback, has become a crucial component for ensuring that LLMs align with human values. An essential part of ensuring that LLMs are aligned for all people is accounting for a diverse set of values. This paper introduces a new theoretical framework to analyze how generalization scales with value diversity and sample quantity in models trained with direct preference optimization. Our framework rigorously assesses how well models generalize after a finite number of gradient steps, reflecting real-world LLM training practices. By analyzing the reward margin associated with each sample and its trajectory throughout training, we provide a bound on the generalization error that demonstrates the challenges of effectively learning a wide set of concepts or values. These insights are empirically validated on contemporary LLMs, underscoring the practical relevance of our theory.
title Can DPO Learn Diverse Human Values? A Theoretical Scaling Law
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.03459