Unsupervised Elicitation of Language Models

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10139v1
• Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2025 19:40:08 GMT
• Title: Unsupervised Elicitation of Language Models
• Authors: Jiaxin Wen, Zachary Ankner, Arushi Somani, Peter Hase, Samuel Marks, Jacob Goldman-Wetzler, Linda Petrini, Henry Sleight, Collin Burns, He He, Shi Feng, Ethan Perez, Jan Leike,
• Abstract summary: We introduce a new unsupervised algorithm, Internal Coherence Maximization (ICM), to fine-tune pretrained language models on their own generated labels.<n>On GSM8k-verification, TruthfulQA, and Alpaca reward modeling tasks, our method matches the performance of training on golden supervision.<n>On tasks where LMs' capabilities are strongly superhuman, our method can elicit those capabilities significantly better than training on human labels.
• Score: 37.00621880299302
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: To steer pretrained language models for downstream tasks, today's post-training paradigm relies on humans to specify desired behaviors. However, for models with superhuman capabilities, it is difficult or impossible to get high-quality human supervision. To address this challenge, we introduce a new unsupervised algorithm, Internal Coherence Maximization (ICM), to fine-tune pretrained language models on their own generated labels, \emph{without external supervision}. On GSM8k-verification, TruthfulQA, and Alpaca reward modeling tasks, our method matches the performance of training on golden supervision and outperforms training on crowdsourced human supervision. On tasks where LMs' capabilities are strongly superhuman, our method can elicit those capabilities significantly better than training on human labels. Finally, we show that our method can improve the training of frontier LMs: we use our method to train an unsupervised reward model and use reinforcement learning to train a Claude 3.5 Haiku-based assistant. Both the reward model and the assistant outperform their human-supervised counterparts.

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