Learning to Reason via Self-Iterative Process Feedback for Small Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Chen, Kaiyuan, Wang, Jin, Zhang, Xuejie
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Chen, Kaiyuan
Wang, Jin
Zhang, Xuejie
author_facet Chen, Kaiyuan
Wang, Jin
Zhang, Xuejie
contents Small language models (SLMs) are more efficient, cost-effective, and customizable than large language models (LLMs), though they often underperform in specific areas like reasoning. Past methods for enhancing SLMs' reasoning, such as supervised fine-tuning and distillation, often depend on costly external signals, resulting in SLMs being overly confident with limited supervision signals, thus limiting their abilities. Therefore, this study enables SLMs to learn to reason from self-iterative feedback. By combining odds ratio preference optimization (ORPO), we fine-tune and align SLMs using positive and negative signals generated by themselves. Additionally, we introduce process supervision for rewards in preference alignment by sampling-based inference simulation and process reward models. Compared to Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), our method improves the performance of Gemma-2B by 12.43 (Acc) on GSM8K and 3.95 (Pass@1) on MBPP. Furthermore, the proposed method also demonstrated superior out-of-domain generalization capabilities on MMLU_Math and HumanEval.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_08393
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning to Reason via Self-Iterative Process Feedback for Small Language Models
Chen, Kaiyuan
Wang, Jin
Zhang, Xuejie
Computation and Language
Small language models (SLMs) are more efficient, cost-effective, and customizable than large language models (LLMs), though they often underperform in specific areas like reasoning. Past methods for enhancing SLMs' reasoning, such as supervised fine-tuning and distillation, often depend on costly external signals, resulting in SLMs being overly confident with limited supervision signals, thus limiting their abilities. Therefore, this study enables SLMs to learn to reason from self-iterative feedback. By combining odds ratio preference optimization (ORPO), we fine-tune and align SLMs using positive and negative signals generated by themselves. Additionally, we introduce process supervision for rewards in preference alignment by sampling-based inference simulation and process reward models. Compared to Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), our method improves the performance of Gemma-2B by 12.43 (Acc) on GSM8K and 3.95 (Pass@1) on MBPP. Furthermore, the proposed method also demonstrated superior out-of-domain generalization capabilities on MMLU_Math and HumanEval.
title Learning to Reason via Self-Iterative Process Feedback for Small Language Models
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.08393