Multi-Objective Linguistic Control of Large Language Models
This addresses the need for more controllable and user-preferred outputs in LLMs, though it is incremental as it builds on existing finetuning techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of controlling multiple linguistic complexities in LLM outputs, such as verbosity, by proposing MCTune, a finetuning method that improves controllability while maintaining or enhancing response quality on benchmarks.
Large language models (LLMs), despite their breakthroughs on many challenging benchmark tasks, lean to generate verbose responses and lack the controllability of output complexity, which is usually preferred by human users in practice. In this paper, we study how to precisely control multiple linguistic complexities of LLM output by finetuning using off-the-shelf data. To this end, we propose multi-control tuning (MCTune), which includes multiple linguistic complexity values of ground-truth responses as controls in the input for instruction tuning. We finetune LLaMA2-7B on Alpaca-GPT4 and WizardLM datasets. Evaluations on widely used benchmarks demonstrate that our method does not only improve LLMs' multi-complexity controllability substantially but also retains or even enhances the quality of the responses as a side benefit.