Poster
Aligning to Thousands of Varying Preferences via System Message Generalization
Seongyun Lee · Sue Hyun Park · Seungone Kim · Minjoon Seo
East Exhibit Hall A-C #3406
Although humans inherently have diverse values, current large language model (LLM) alignment methods often assume that aligning LLMs with the general public’s preferences is optimal. A major challenge in adopting a more individualized approach to LLM alignment is scalability, as it involves repeatedly acquiring preference data and training new reward models and LLMs for each individual’s preferences. To address these challenges, we propose a new paradigm where users specify what they value most within the system messages steering the LLM’s generation behavior to better align with the user's intentions. However, a naive adaptation of such an approach is non-trivial since LLMs are typically trained on a uniform system messages (e.g., "You are a helpful assistant") which limits their ability to generalize to diverse, unseen system messages. To improve this generalization, we create the Multifaceted Collection, a preference dataset with 192k combinations of values beyond generic helpfulness and harmlessness, spanning 65k user instructions. Using this dataset, we train a 7B LLM called Janus and test it on 921 prompts from 5 benchmarks (AlpacaEval 2.0, FLASK, Koala, MT-Bench, and Self-Instruct) by adding various unseen system messages that reflect user preferences. Janus demonstrates performance that is as good as or better than Mistral 7B Instruct v0.2, GPT-3.5 Turbo, and GPT-4, 75.2%, 72.4%, and 66.4% of the time, respectively. Unexpectedly, on three benchmarks focused on response helpfulness (AlpacaEval 2.0, MT-Bench, Arena Hard Auto v0.1), Janus also outperforms LLaMA 3 8B Instruct by a +4.0%, +0.1%, +3.0% margin, underscoring that training with a vast array of system messages could also enhance alignment to the general public's preference as well. Our code, dataset, benchmark, and models are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/janus.
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