Self-Improvement in Language Models: The Sharpening Mechanism

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.01951v2
• Date: Wed, 04 Dec 2024 14:20:21 GMT
• Title: Self-Improvement in Language Models: The Sharpening Mechanism
• Authors: Audrey Huang, Adam Block, Dylan J. Foster, Dhruv Rohatgi, Cyril Zhang, Max Simchowitz, Jordan T. Ash, Akshay Krishnamurthy,
• Abstract summary: We offer a new perspective on the capabilities of self-improvement through a lens we refer to as sharpening.<n>Motivated by the observation that language models are often better at verifying response quality than they are at generating correct responses, we formalize self-improvement as using the model itself as a verifier during post-training.<n>We analyze two natural families of self-improvement algorithms based on SFT and RLHF.
• Score: 70.9248553790022
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Recent work in language modeling has raised the possibility of self-improvement, where a language models evaluates and refines its own generations to achieve higher performance without external feedback. It is impossible for this self-improvement to create information that is not already in the model, so why should we expect that this will lead to improved capabilities? We offer a new perspective on the capabilities of self-improvement through a lens we refer to as sharpening. Motivated by the observation that language models are often better at verifying response quality than they are at generating correct responses, we formalize self-improvement as using the model itself as a verifier during post-training in order to ``sharpen'' the model to one placing large mass on high-quality sequences, thereby amortizing the expensive inference-time computation of generating good sequences. We begin by introducing a new statistical framework for sharpening in which the learner aims to sharpen a pre-trained base policy via sample access, and establish fundamental limits. Then we analyze two natural families of self-improvement algorithms based on SFT and RLHF. We find that (i) the SFT-based approach is minimax optimal whenever the initial model has sufficient coverage, but (ii) the RLHF-based approach can improve over SFT-based self-improvement by leveraging online exploration, bypassing the need for coverage. Finally, we empirically validate the sharpening mechanism via inference-time and amortization experiments. We view these findings as a starting point toward a foundational understanding that can guide the design and evaluation of self-improvement algorithms.

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