In plain words: A language model plays a word game against a copy of itself, trying to make it say a secret word while the other tries to guess it; both learn from who wins. Training this way raised its scores on reasoning tests, and more rounds kept improving them.
Abstract · Self-playing Adversarial Language Game Enhances LLM Reasoning
We explore the potential of self-play training for large language models (LLMs) in a two-player adversarial language game called Adversarial Taboo. In this game, an attacker and a defender communicate around a target word only visible to the attacker. The attacker aims to induce the defender to speak the target word unconsciously, while the defender tries to infer the target word from the attacker's utterances. To win the game, both players must have sufficient knowledge about the target word and high-level reasoning ability to infer and express in this information-reserved conversation. Hence, we are curious about whether LLMs' reasoning ability can be further enhanced by Self-Playing this Adversarial language Game (SPAG). With this goal, we select several open-source LLMs and let each act as the attacker and play with a copy of itself as the defender on an extensive range of target words. Through reinforcement learning on the game outcomes, we observe that the LLMs' performances uniformly improve on a broad range of reasoning benchmarks. Furthermore, iteratively adopting this self-play process can continuously promote LLMs' reasoning abilities. The code is available at https://github.com/Linear95/SPAG.
Pengyu Cheng, Tianhao Hu, Han Xu, Zhisong Zhang, Zheng Yuan, Yong Dai, Lei Han, Nan Du, Xiaolong Li
arXiv:2404.10642 · cs.CL, cs.LG · submitted Apr 16, 2024 · updated Jan 24, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted by NeurIPS 2024
I'm not sure how we move into RL-type LLM enhancement (like what Andrej Karpathy talks about here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3b-JASoPi0&t=1521s )
But this seems like a reasonable first step.