Automatic Pair Construction for Contrastive Post-training
This addresses the challenge of efficiently aligning LLMs for better performance, though it is incremental as it builds on existing contrastive techniques.
The paper tackled the problem of aligning large language models with human preferences by automatically constructing contrastive data from multiple models, resulting in DPO providing a step-function improvement over SFT baselines and scaling to improve Orca to outperform ChatGPT.
Alignment serves as an important step to steer large language models (LLMs) towards human preferences. In this paper, we propose an automatic way to construct contrastive data for LLM, using preference pairs from multiple models of varying strengths (e.g., InstructGPT, ChatGPT and GPT-4). We compare the contrastive techniques of SLiC and DPO to SFT baselines and find that DPO provides a step-function improvement even after continuing SFT saturates. We also explore a data curriculum learning scheme for contrastive post-training, which starts by learning from "easier" pairs and transitioning to "harder" ones, which further improves alignment. Finally, we scale up our experiments to train with more data and larger models like Orca. Remarkably, our automatic contrastive post-training further improves the performance of Orca, already a state-of-the-art instruction learning model tuned with GPT-4 outputs, to outperform ChatGPT.