Scaling Data Diversity for Fine-Tuning Language Models in Human Alignment

Feifan Song, Bowen Yu, Hao Lang, Haiyang Yu, Fei Huang, Houfeng Wang, Yongbin Li


Abstract
Alignment with human preference prevents large language models (LLMs) from generating misleading or toxic content while requiring high-cost human feedback. Assuming resources of human annotation are limited, there are two different ways of allocating considered: more diverse PROMPTS or more diverse RESPONSES to be labeled. Nonetheless, a straightforward comparison between their impact is absent. In this work, we first control the diversity of both sides according to the number of samples for fine-tuning, which can directly reflect their influence. We find that instead of numerous prompts, more responses but fewer prompts better trigger LLMs for human alignment. Additionally, the concept of diversity for prompts can be more complex than responses that are typically quantified by single digits. Consequently, a new formulation of prompt diversity is proposed, further implying a linear correlation with the final performance of LLMs after fine-tuning. We also leverage it on data augmentation and conduct experiments to show its effect on different algorithms.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.1251
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:
14358–14369
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1251
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Feifan Song, Bowen Yu, Hao Lang, Haiyang Yu, Fei Huang, Houfeng Wang, and Yongbin Li. 2024. Scaling Data Diversity for Fine-Tuning Language Models in Human Alignment. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 14358–14369, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Scaling Data Diversity for Fine-Tuning Language Models in Human Alignment (Song et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1251.pdf