Preference-Oriented Supervised Fine-Tuning: Favoring Target Model Over Aligned Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Fan, Yuchen, Hong, Yuzhong, Wang, Qiushi, Bao, Junwei, Jiang, Hongfei, Song, Yang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Fan, Yuchen
Hong, Yuzhong
Wang, Qiushi
Bao, Junwei
Jiang, Hongfei
Song, Yang
author_facet Fan, Yuchen
Hong, Yuzhong
Wang, Qiushi
Bao, Junwei
Jiang, Hongfei
Song, Yang
contents Alignment, endowing a pre-trained Large language model (LLM) with the ability to follow instructions, is crucial for its real-world applications. Conventional supervised fine-tuning (SFT) methods formalize it as causal language modeling typically with a cross-entropy objective, requiring a large amount of high-quality instruction-response pairs. However, the quality of widely used SFT datasets can not be guaranteed due to the high cost and intensive labor for the creation and maintenance in practice. To overcome the limitations associated with the quality of SFT datasets, we introduce a novel \textbf{p}reference-\textbf{o}riented supervised \textbf{f}ine-\textbf{t}uning approach, namely PoFT. The intuition is to boost SFT by imposing a particular preference: \textit{favoring the target model over aligned LLMs on the same SFT data.} This preference encourages the target model to predict a higher likelihood than that predicted by the aligned LLMs, incorporating assessment information on data quality (i.e., predicted likelihood by the aligned LLMs) into the training process. Extensive experiments are conducted, and the results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. PoFT achieves stable and consistent improvements over the SFT baselines across different training datasets and base models. Moreover, we prove that PoFT can be integrated with existing SFT data filtering methods to achieve better performance, and further improved by following preference optimization procedures, such as DPO.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_12865
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Preference-Oriented Supervised Fine-Tuning: Favoring Target Model Over Aligned Large Language Models
Fan, Yuchen
Hong, Yuzhong
Wang, Qiushi
Bao, Junwei
Jiang, Hongfei
Song, Yang
Computation and Language
Alignment, endowing a pre-trained Large language model (LLM) with the ability to follow instructions, is crucial for its real-world applications. Conventional supervised fine-tuning (SFT) methods formalize it as causal language modeling typically with a cross-entropy objective, requiring a large amount of high-quality instruction-response pairs. However, the quality of widely used SFT datasets can not be guaranteed due to the high cost and intensive labor for the creation and maintenance in practice. To overcome the limitations associated with the quality of SFT datasets, we introduce a novel \textbf{p}reference-\textbf{o}riented supervised \textbf{f}ine-\textbf{t}uning approach, namely PoFT. The intuition is to boost SFT by imposing a particular preference: \textit{favoring the target model over aligned LLMs on the same SFT data.} This preference encourages the target model to predict a higher likelihood than that predicted by the aligned LLMs, incorporating assessment information on data quality (i.e., predicted likelihood by the aligned LLMs) into the training process. Extensive experiments are conducted, and the results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. PoFT achieves stable and consistent improvements over the SFT baselines across different training datasets and base models. Moreover, we prove that PoFT can be integrated with existing SFT data filtering methods to achieve better performance, and further improved by following preference optimization procedures, such as DPO.
title Preference-Oriented Supervised Fine-Tuning: Favoring Target Model Over Aligned Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.12865