@inproceedings{wu-etal-2024-dancing,
title = "Dancing in Chains: Reconciling Instruction Following and Faithfulness in Language Models",
author = "Wu, Zhengxuan and
Zhang, Yuhao and
Qi, Peng and
Xu, Yumo and
Han, Rujun and
Zhang, Yian and
Chen, Jifan and
Min, Bonan and
Huang, Zhiheng",
editor = "Al-Onaizan, Yaser and
Bansal, Mohit and
Chen, Yun-Nung",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
month = nov,
year = "2024",
address = "Miami, Florida, USA",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.229",
pages = "3942--3965",
abstract = "Modern language models (LMs) need to follow human instructions while being faithful; yet, they often fail to achieve both. Here, we provide concrete evidence of a trade-off between instruction following (i.e., follow open-ended instructions) and faithfulness (i.e., ground responses in given context) when training LMs with these objectives. For instance, fine-tuning LLaMA-7B on instruction following datasets renders it less faithful. Conversely, instruction-tuned Vicuna-7B shows degraded performance at following instructions when further optimized on tasks that require contextual grounding. One common remedy is multi-task learning (MTL) with data mixing, yet it remains far from achieving a synergic outcome. We propose a simple yet effective method that relies on Reject-sampling by Self-instruct with Continued Fine-tuning (ReSet), which significantly outperforms vanilla MTL. Surprisingly, we find that less is more, as training ReSet with high-quality, yet substantially smaller data (three-fold less) yields superior results. Our findings offer a better understanding of objective discrepancies in alignment training of LMs.",
}
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<abstract>Modern language models (LMs) need to follow human instructions while being faithful; yet, they often fail to achieve both. Here, we provide concrete evidence of a trade-off between instruction following (i.e., follow open-ended instructions) and faithfulness (i.e., ground responses in given context) when training LMs with these objectives. For instance, fine-tuning LLaMA-7B on instruction following datasets renders it less faithful. Conversely, instruction-tuned Vicuna-7B shows degraded performance at following instructions when further optimized on tasks that require contextual grounding. One common remedy is multi-task learning (MTL) with data mixing, yet it remains far from achieving a synergic outcome. We propose a simple yet effective method that relies on Reject-sampling by Self-instruct with Continued Fine-tuning (ReSet), which significantly outperforms vanilla MTL. Surprisingly, we find that less is more, as training ReSet with high-quality, yet substantially smaller data (three-fold less) yields superior results. Our findings offer a better understanding of objective discrepancies in alignment training of LMs.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Dancing in Chains: Reconciling Instruction Following and Faithfulness in Language Models
%A Wu, Zhengxuan
%A Zhang, Yuhao
%A Qi, Peng
%A Xu, Yumo
%A Han, Rujun
%A Zhang, Yian
%A Chen, Jifan
%A Min, Bonan
%A Huang, Zhiheng
%Y Al-Onaizan, Yaser
%Y Bansal, Mohit
%Y Chen, Yun-Nung
%S Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
%D 2024
%8 November
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Miami, Florida, USA
%F wu-etal-2024-dancing
%X Modern language models (LMs) need to follow human instructions while being faithful; yet, they often fail to achieve both. Here, we provide concrete evidence of a trade-off between instruction following (i.e., follow open-ended instructions) and faithfulness (i.e., ground responses in given context) when training LMs with these objectives. For instance, fine-tuning LLaMA-7B on instruction following datasets renders it less faithful. Conversely, instruction-tuned Vicuna-7B shows degraded performance at following instructions when further optimized on tasks that require contextual grounding. One common remedy is multi-task learning (MTL) with data mixing, yet it remains far from achieving a synergic outcome. We propose a simple yet effective method that relies on Reject-sampling by Self-instruct with Continued Fine-tuning (ReSet), which significantly outperforms vanilla MTL. Surprisingly, we find that less is more, as training ReSet with high-quality, yet substantially smaller data (three-fold less) yields superior results. Our findings offer a better understanding of objective discrepancies in alignment training of LMs.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.229
%P 3942-3965
Markdown (Informal)
[Dancing in Chains: Reconciling Instruction Following and Faithfulness in Language Models](https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.229) (Wu et al., EMNLP 2024)
ACL
- Zhengxuan Wu, Yuhao Zhang, Peng Qi, Yumo Xu, Rujun Han, Yian Zhang, Jifan Chen, Bonan Min, and Zhiheng Huang. 2024. Dancing in Chains: Reconciling Instruction Following and Faithfulness in Language Models. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 3942–3965, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.