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Unintended Impacts of LLM Alignment on Global Representation (arxiv.org)
2 points by rntn on Aug 7, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Testing how tuning AI to match human preferences changes its handling of English dialects, world languages, and opinions about countries, the study found the tuning widened gaps between dialects and global opinions. It did improve performance in several languages.

Abstract

Before being deployed for user-facing applications, developers align Large Language Models (LLMs) to user preferences through a variety of procedures, such as Reinforcement Learning From Human Feedback (RLHF) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). Current evaluations of these procedures focus on benchmarks of instruction following, reasoning, and truthfulness. However, human preferences are not universal, and aligning to specific preference sets may have unintended effects. We explore how alignment impacts performance along three axes of global representation: English dialects, multilingualism, and opinions from and about countries worldwide. Our results show that current alignment procedures create disparities between English dialects and global opinions. We find alignment improves capabilities in several languages. We conclude by discussing design decisions that led to these unintended impacts and recommendations for more equitable preference tuning. We make our code and data publicly available on Github.

Michael J. Ryan, William Held, Diyi Yang
arXiv:2402.15018 · cs.CL, cs.CY, cs.LG · submitted Feb 22, 2024 · updated Jun 6, 2024
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted to ACL 2024 main conference

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