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The Poison of Alignment (arxiv.org)
2 points by codentropy on Aug 31, 2023 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Safety answers that teach a model to refuse harmful requests also seem to poison the rest of its training data, so the study compared tuning with and without them. Models trained with those answers scored 4-33% lower on reasoning tests than training without them.

Abstract

From the perspective of content safety issues, alignment has shown to limit large language models' (LLMs) harmful content generation. This intentional method of reinforcing models to not respond to certain user inputs seem to be present in many modern open-source instruction tuning datasets such as OpenAssistant or Guanaco. We introduce a novel insight to an instruction-tuned model's performance affected by the presence of alignment in supervised fine-tuning dataset. To be specific, we noticed that alignment acts as if it is poisoning the instruction dataset. Experimentally, we demonstrate that aligned answers significantly worsen the performance of the resulting fine-tuned model's on various reasoning benchmarks such as Big Bench (BBH), Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU), Human Eval, and Discrete Reasoning Over Paragraphs (DROP), performing worse than the counterpart tuned without alignment by 4-33%.

Aibek Bekbayev, Sungbae Chun, Yerzat Dulat, James Yamazaki
arXiv:2308.13449 · cs.CL · submitted Aug 25, 2023
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Also discussed: Aug 2023 (17 points, 3 comments) · Aug 2023 (1 point, 1 comment)