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Learning to Decode Collaboratively with Multiple Language Models (arxiv.org)
2 points by padolsey on Mar 7, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Several language models take turns writing one word at a time, and the main model learns on its own when to write and when to hand a word to a specialist. The combined system beat each model alone on instruction-following, question answering, and reasoning.

Abstract

We propose a method to teach multiple large language models (LLM) to collaborate by interleaving their generations at the token level. We model the decision of which LLM generates the next token as a latent variable. By optimizing the marginal likelihood of a training set under our latent variable model, the base LLM automatically learns when to generate itself and when to call on one of the ``assistant'' language models to generate, all without direct supervision. Token-level collaboration during decoding allows for a fusion of each model's expertise in a manner tailored to the specific task at hand. Our collaborative decoding is especially useful in cross-domain settings where a generalist base LLM learns to invoke domain expert models. On instruction-following, domain-specific QA, and reasoning tasks, we show that the performance of the joint system exceeds that of the individual models. Through qualitative analysis of the learned latent decisions, we show models trained with our method exhibit several interesting collaboration patterns, e.g., template-filling. Our code is available at https://github.com/clinicalml/co-llm.

Shannon Zejiang Shen, Hunter Lang, Bailin Wang, Yoon Kim, David Sontag
arXiv:2403.03870 · cs.CL, cs.LG · submitted Mar 6, 2024 · updated Aug 27, 2024
abstract · pdf · html · 16 pages, 4 figures, 11 tables

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