Training Socially Aligned Language Models on Simulated Social Interactions

Ruibo Liu, Ruixin Yang, Chenyan Jia, Ge Zhang, Diyi Yang, Soroush Vosoughi

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Keywords: AI alignment, AI safety, Natural Language Processing

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TL;DR: Aligning language models by training on recorded social simulation data.

Abstract: The goal of social alignment for AI systems is to make sure these models can conduct themselves appropriately following social values. Unlike humans who establish a consensus on value judgments through social interaction, current language models (LMs) are trained to rigidly recite the corpus in social isolation, which causes poor generalization in unfamiliar cases and the lack of robustness under adversarial attacks. In this work, we introduce a new training paradigm that enables LMs to learn from simulated social interactions. Compared with existing methods, our method is much more scalable and efficient, and shows superior performance in alignment benchmarks and human evaluation.

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Primary Area: societal considerations including fairness, safety, privacy

Submission Number: 5792