Improving the Robustness of Large Language Models via Consistency Alignment

Yukun Zhao, Lingyong Yan, Weiwei Sun, Guoliang Xing, Shuaiqiang Wang, Chong Meng, Zhicong Cheng, Zhaochun Ren, Dawei Yin


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have shown tremendous success in following user instructions and generating helpful responses. Nevertheless, their robustness is still far from optimal, as they may generate significantly inconsistent responses due to minor changes in the verbalized instructions. Recent literature has explored this inconsistency issue, highlighting the importance of continued improvement in the robustness of response generation. However, systematic analysis and solutions are still lacking. In this paper, we quantitatively define the inconsistency problem and propose a two-stage training framework consisting of instruction-augmented supervised fine-tuning and consistency alignment training. The first stage helps a model generalize on following instructions via similar instruction augmentations. In the second stage, we improve the diversity and help the model understand which responses are more aligned with human expectations by differentiating subtle differences in similar responses. The training process is accomplished by self-rewards inferred from the trained model at the first stage without referring to external human preference resources. We conduct extensive experiments on recent publicly available LLMs on instruction-following tasks and demonstrate the effectiveness of our training framework.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.782
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
8931–8941
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.782
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yukun Zhao, Lingyong Yan, Weiwei Sun, Guoliang Xing, Shuaiqiang Wang, Chong Meng, Zhicong Cheng, Zhaochun Ren, and Dawei Yin. 2024. Improving the Robustness of Large Language Models via Consistency Alignment. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 8931–8941, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Improving the Robustness of Large Language Models via Consistency Alignment (Zhao et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.782.pdf