Importance Weighting Can Help Large Language Models Self-Improve

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Jiang, Chunyang, Chan, Chi-min, Xue, Wei, Liu, Qifeng, Guo, Yike
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Jiang, Chunyang
Chan, Chi-min
Xue, Wei
Liu, Qifeng
Guo, Yike
author_facet Jiang, Chunyang
Chan, Chi-min
Xue, Wei
Liu, Qifeng
Guo, Yike
contents Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capability in numerous tasks and applications. However, fine-tuning LLMs using high-quality datasets under external supervision remains prohibitively expensive. In response, LLM self-improvement approaches have been vibrantly developed recently. The typical paradigm of LLM self-improvement involves training LLM on self-generated data, part of which may be detrimental and should be filtered out due to the unstable data quality. While current works primarily employs filtering strategies based on answer correctness, in this paper, we demonstrate that filtering out correct but with high distribution shift extent (DSE) samples could also benefit the results of self-improvement. Given that the actual sample distribution is usually inaccessible, we propose a new metric called DS weight to approximate DSE, inspired by the Importance Weighting methods. Consequently, we integrate DS weight with self-consistency to comprehensively filter the self-generated samples and fine-tune the language model. Experiments show that with only a tiny valid set (up to 5\% size of the training set) to compute DS weight, our approach can notably promote the reasoning ability of current LLM self-improvement methods. The resulting performance is on par with methods that rely on external supervision from pre-trained reward models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_09849
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Importance Weighting Can Help Large Language Models Self-Improve
Jiang, Chunyang
Chan, Chi-min
Xue, Wei
Liu, Qifeng
Guo, Yike
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capability in numerous tasks and applications. However, fine-tuning LLMs using high-quality datasets under external supervision remains prohibitively expensive. In response, LLM self-improvement approaches have been vibrantly developed recently. The typical paradigm of LLM self-improvement involves training LLM on self-generated data, part of which may be detrimental and should be filtered out due to the unstable data quality. While current works primarily employs filtering strategies based on answer correctness, in this paper, we demonstrate that filtering out correct but with high distribution shift extent (DSE) samples could also benefit the results of self-improvement. Given that the actual sample distribution is usually inaccessible, we propose a new metric called DS weight to approximate DSE, inspired by the Importance Weighting methods. Consequently, we integrate DS weight with self-consistency to comprehensively filter the self-generated samples and fine-tune the language model. Experiments show that with only a tiny valid set (up to 5\% size of the training set) to compute DS weight, our approach can notably promote the reasoning ability of current LLM self-improvement methods. The resulting performance is on par with methods that rely on external supervision from pre-trained reward models.
title Importance Weighting Can Help Large Language Models Self-Improve
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.09849