Imitating Language via Scalable Inverse Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Wulfmeier, Markus, Bloesch, Michael, Vieillard, Nino, Ahuja, Arun, Bornschein, Jorg, Huang, Sandy, Sokolov, Artem, Barnes, Matt, Desjardins, Guillaume, Bewley, Alex, Bechtle, Sarah Maria Elisabeth, Springenberg, Jost Tobias, Momchev, Nikola, Bachem, Olivier, Geist, Matthieu, Riedmiller, Martin
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Wulfmeier, Markus
Bloesch, Michael
Vieillard, Nino
Ahuja, Arun
Bornschein, Jorg
Huang, Sandy
Sokolov, Artem
Barnes, Matt
Desjardins, Guillaume
Bewley, Alex
Bechtle, Sarah Maria Elisabeth
Springenberg, Jost Tobias
Momchev, Nikola
Bachem, Olivier
Geist, Matthieu
Riedmiller, Martin
author_facet Wulfmeier, Markus
Bloesch, Michael
Vieillard, Nino
Ahuja, Arun
Bornschein, Jorg
Huang, Sandy
Sokolov, Artem
Barnes, Matt
Desjardins, Guillaume
Bewley, Alex
Bechtle, Sarah Maria Elisabeth
Springenberg, Jost Tobias
Momchev, Nikola
Bachem, Olivier
Geist, Matthieu
Riedmiller, Martin
contents The majority of language model training builds on imitation learning. It covers pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, and affects the starting conditions for reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). The simplicity and scalability of maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) for next token prediction led to its role as predominant paradigm. However, the broader field of imitation learning can more effectively utilize the sequential structure underlying autoregressive generation. We focus on investigating the inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) perspective to imitation, extracting rewards and directly optimizing sequences instead of individual token likelihoods and evaluate its benefits for fine-tuning large language models. We provide a new angle, reformulating inverse soft-Q-learning as a temporal difference regularized extension of MLE. This creates a principled connection between MLE and IRL and allows trading off added complexity with increased performance and diversity of generations in the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) setting. We find clear advantages for IRL-based imitation, in particular for retaining diversity while maximizing task performance, rendering IRL a strong alternative on fixed SFT datasets even without online data generation. Our analysis of IRL-extracted reward functions further indicates benefits for more robust reward functions via tighter integration of supervised and preference-based LLM post-training.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_01369
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Imitating Language via Scalable Inverse Reinforcement Learning
Wulfmeier, Markus
Bloesch, Michael
Vieillard, Nino
Ahuja, Arun
Bornschein, Jorg
Huang, Sandy
Sokolov, Artem
Barnes, Matt
Desjardins, Guillaume
Bewley, Alex
Bechtle, Sarah Maria Elisabeth
Springenberg, Jost Tobias
Momchev, Nikola
Bachem, Olivier
Geist, Matthieu
Riedmiller, Martin
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
The majority of language model training builds on imitation learning. It covers pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, and affects the starting conditions for reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). The simplicity and scalability of maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) for next token prediction led to its role as predominant paradigm. However, the broader field of imitation learning can more effectively utilize the sequential structure underlying autoregressive generation. We focus on investigating the inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) perspective to imitation, extracting rewards and directly optimizing sequences instead of individual token likelihoods and evaluate its benefits for fine-tuning large language models. We provide a new angle, reformulating inverse soft-Q-learning as a temporal difference regularized extension of MLE. This creates a principled connection between MLE and IRL and allows trading off added complexity with increased performance and diversity of generations in the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) setting. We find clear advantages for IRL-based imitation, in particular for retaining diversity while maximizing task performance, rendering IRL a strong alternative on fixed SFT datasets even without online data generation. Our analysis of IRL-extracted reward functions further indicates benefits for more robust reward functions via tighter integration of supervised and preference-based LLM post-training.
title Imitating Language via Scalable Inverse Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.01369