Weak-to-Strong Generalization beyond Accuracy: a Pilot Study in Safety, Toxicity, and Legal Reasoning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ye, Ruimeng, Xiao, Yang, Hui, Bo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Ye, Ruimeng
Xiao, Yang
Hui, Bo
author_facet Ye, Ruimeng
Xiao, Yang
Hui, Bo
contents As large language models (LLMs) continue to advance, ensuring their alignment with human values becomes increasingly critical. Traditional alignment methods heavily rely on human feedback to fine-tune models. With the emergence of superhuman models whose outputs may surpass human understanding, evaluating and aligning these models using human judgments poses significant challenges. To address the challenges, recent works use weak supervisors to elicit knowledge from much stronger models. However, there are important disanalogies between the empirical setup in the existing works and the genuine goal of alignment. We remark that existing works investigate the phenomenon of weak-to-strong generation in analogous setup (i.e., binary classification), rather than practical alignment-relevant tasks (e.g., safety). In this paper, we bridge this gap by extending weak-to-strong generation to the context of practical alignment. We empirically demonstrate the widespread phenomenon of weak-to-strong generation in three complicated alignment tasks: safety, toxicity, and legal reasoning}. Furthermore, we explore efficient strategies for improving alignment performance to enhance the quality of model outcomes. Lastly, we summarize and analyze the challenges and potential solutions in regard to specific alignment tasks, which we hope to catalyze the research progress on the topic of weak-to-strong generalization. Our code is released at https://github.com/yeruimeng/WTS.git.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_12621
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Weak-to-Strong Generalization beyond Accuracy: a Pilot Study in Safety, Toxicity, and Legal Reasoning
Ye, Ruimeng
Xiao, Yang
Hui, Bo
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
As large language models (LLMs) continue to advance, ensuring their alignment with human values becomes increasingly critical. Traditional alignment methods heavily rely on human feedback to fine-tune models. With the emergence of superhuman models whose outputs may surpass human understanding, evaluating and aligning these models using human judgments poses significant challenges. To address the challenges, recent works use weak supervisors to elicit knowledge from much stronger models. However, there are important disanalogies between the empirical setup in the existing works and the genuine goal of alignment. We remark that existing works investigate the phenomenon of weak-to-strong generation in analogous setup (i.e., binary classification), rather than practical alignment-relevant tasks (e.g., safety). In this paper, we bridge this gap by extending weak-to-strong generation to the context of practical alignment. We empirically demonstrate the widespread phenomenon of weak-to-strong generation in three complicated alignment tasks: safety, toxicity, and legal reasoning}. Furthermore, we explore efficient strategies for improving alignment performance to enhance the quality of model outcomes. Lastly, we summarize and analyze the challenges and potential solutions in regard to specific alignment tasks, which we hope to catalyze the research progress on the topic of weak-to-strong generalization. Our code is released at https://github.com/yeruimeng/WTS.git.
title Weak-to-Strong Generalization beyond Accuracy: a Pilot Study in Safety, Toxicity, and Legal Reasoning
topic Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.12621