Robust Multi-Objective Controlled Decoding of Large Language Models
Test-time alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) to human preferences offers a flexible way to generate responses aligned to diverse objectives without extensive retraining of LLMs. Existing methods achieve alignment to multiple objectives simultaneously (e.g., instruction-following, helpfulness, conciseness) by optimizing their corresponding reward functions. However, they often rely on predefined weights or optimize for averages, sacrificing one objective for another and leading to unbalanced outcomes. To address this, we introduce Robust Multi-Objective Decoding (RMOD), a novel inference-time algorithm that optimizes for improving worst-case rewards. RMOD formalizes the robust decoding problem as a maximin two-player game between reward weights and the sampling policy, solving for the Nash equilibrium. We show that the game reduces to a convex optimization problem to find the worst-case weights, while the best response policy can be computed analytically. We also introduce a practical RMOD variant designed for efficient decoding with contemporary LLMs, incurring minimal computational overhead compared to non-robust Multi-Objective Decoding (MOD) methods. Our experimental results showcase the effectiveness of RMOD in generating responses equitably aligned with diverse objectives, outperforming baselines up to 20%.
Code (1)
Tasks
Instruction FollowingSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Controlled Decoding from Language Models
KL-regularized reinforcement learning (RL) is a popular alignment framework to control the language model responses towards high reward outcomes. We pose a tokenwise RL objective and propose a modular solver for it, call…
Language ModelingLanguage ModellingMulti-Objective Reinforcement Learningreinforcement-learning+2Critic-Guided Decoding for Controlled Text Generation
Steering language generation towards objectives or away from undesired content has been a long-standing goal in utilizing language models (LM). Recent work has demonstrated reinforcement learning and weighted decoding as…
Language ModelingLanguage Modellingreinforcement-learningReinforcement Learning+2Visual-Redundancy-Controlled Parallel Decoding for Diffusion-Based Multimodal Large Language Models
Diffusion-based multimodal large language models (dMLLMs) decode by iteratively predicting tokens at multiple masked positions in parallel. This turns each decoding step into a position-selection problem: the model must …
Visual GroundingDifferences in Text Generated by Diffusion and Autoregressive Language Models
Diffusion language models (DLMs) are promising alternatives to autoregressive language models (ARMs), yet the intrinsic differences in their generated text remain underexplored. We first find empirically that off-the-she…
Text GenerationEfficient Controlled Language Generation with Low-Rank Autoregressive Reward Models
Language models trained on large amounts of data are known to produce inappropriate content in some cases and require careful tuning to be used in the real world. We revisit the reward augmented decoding (RAD) approach t…
Language ModelingLanguage ModellingText Generation