Conditional Language Policy: A General Framework For Steerable Multi-Objective Finetuning

Published: 01 Jan 2024, Last Modified: 16 Apr 2025EMNLP (Findings) 2024EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY-SA 4.0
Abstract: Reward-based finetuning is crucial for aligning language policies with intended behaviors (*e.g.*, creativity and safety). A key challenge is to develop steerable language models that trade-off multiple (conflicting) objectives in a flexible and efficient manner. This paper presents Conditional Language Policy (CLP), a general framework for finetuning language models on multiple objectives. Building on techniques from multi-task training and parameter-efficient finetuning, CLP learn steerable models that effectively trade-off conflicting objectives at *inference time*. Notably, this does not require training or maintaining multiple models to achieve different trade-offs between the objectives. Through extensive experiments and ablations on two summarization datasets, we show that CLP learns steerable language models that outperform and Pareto-dominate the existing approaches for multi-objective
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