arxiv:2407.16637

Course-Correction: Safety Alignment Using Synthetic Preferences

Published on Jul 23

· Submitted by

pillowsofwind on Jul 26

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Authors:

Rongwu Xu ,

Renjie Gu ,

Haiqin Weng ,

Abstract

The risk of harmful content generated by large language models (LLMs) becomes a critical concern. This paper presents a systematic study on assessing and improving LLMs' capability to perform the task of course-correction, \ie, the model can steer away from generating harmful content autonomously. To start with, we introduce the C^2-Eval benchmark for quantitative assessment and analyze 10 popular LLMs, revealing varying proficiency of current safety-tuned LLMs in course-correction. To improve, we propose fine-tuning LLMs with preference learning, emphasizing the preference for timely course-correction. Using an automated pipeline, we create C^2-Syn, a synthetic dataset with 750K pairwise preferences, to teach models the concept of timely course-correction through data-driven preference learning. Experiments on 2 LLMs, Llama2-Chat 7B and Qwen2 7B, show that our method effectively enhances course-correction skills without affecting general performance. Additionally, it effectively improves LLMs' safety, particularly in resisting jailbreak attacks.

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pillowsofwind

Paper author Paper submitter Jul 26

Our latest paper delves into LLMs' ability to perform safety self-correction, namely COURSE-CORRECTION.

In this paper, we:

Benchmark course-correction ability
Improving using synthetic preferences.

Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.16637
Code: https://github.com/pillowsofwind/Course-Correction

(Figure 2) 🔰To start with, we quantitatively assess current open-source LLMs' ability to perform safety course-correction by counting the CORRECTIVE decoding paths.

(Figure 3) 📐After evaluating 10 LLMs, we found some characteristics:

The course-correction capabilities of different SAFETY-tuned models vary widely. 😰
For some LLMs, the more initially harmful content, the EASIER it is to perform course-correct. 😹

(Figure 4) 🏹To improve, the strategy is really simple, we craft 750K synthetic preferences by following two value principles:

Correction is better than not
Early correction is better than a later one

(Figure 5,6,7)We apply our synthetic data to DPO training and find that:
👉improve the course-correction ability and overall safety
👉improve the robustness of 4 jailbreak attacks
👉no harm to overall performance
👉lifted safety token probs on later decoding positions