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Self-Rewarding Language Models (arxiv.org)
3 points by jonbaer on Jan 19, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Instead of a separate reward model trained on human ratings, the model grades its own answers like a judge and uses those scores to train itself. After three rounds, a 70B Llama 2 beat Claude 2, Gemini Pro, and GPT-4 on an instruction-following ranking.

Abstract

We posit that to achieve superhuman agents, future models require superhuman feedback in order to provide an adequate training signal. Current approaches commonly train reward models from human preferences, which may then be bottlenecked by human performance level, and secondly these separate frozen reward models cannot then learn to improve during LLM training. In this work, we study Self-Rewarding Language Models, where the language model itself is used via LLM-as-a-Judge prompting to provide its own rewards during training. We show that during Iterative DPO training that not only does instruction following ability improve, but also the ability to provide high-quality rewards to itself. Fine-tuning Llama 2 70B on three iterations of our approach yields a model that outperforms many existing systems on the AlpacaEval 2.0 leaderboard, including Claude 2, Gemini Pro, and GPT-4 0613. While there is much left still to explore, this work opens the door to the possibility of models that can continually improve in both axes.

Weizhe Yuan, Richard Yuanzhe Pang, Kyunghyun Cho, Xian Li, Sainbayar Sukhbaatar, Jing Xu, Jason Weston
arXiv:2401.10020 · cs.CL, cs.AI · submitted Jan 18, 2024 · updated Mar 28, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · ICML 2024

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