EnsemW2S: Enhancing Weak-to-Strong Generalization with Large Language Model Ensembles

ACL ARR 2026 January Submission8428 Authors

Keywords: weak-to-strong generalization, superalignment, Ensemble Learning, multi-LLM Decoding

Abstract: With Large Language Models (LLMs) rapidly approaching and potentially surpassing human-level performance, it has become imperative to develop approaches capable of effectively supervising and enhancing these powerful models using smaller, human-level models exposed to only human-level data. We address this critical weak-to-strong (W2S) generalization challenge by proposing a novel method aimed at improving weak experts, by training on the same limited human-level data, enabling them to generalize to complex, super-human-level tasks. Our approach, called **EnsemW2S**, employs a token-level ensemble strategy that iteratively combines multiple weak experts, systematically addressing the shortcomings identified in preceding iterations. By continuously refining these weak models, we significantly enhance their collective ability to supervise stronger student models. We extensively evaluate the generalization performance of both the ensemble of weak experts and the subsequent strong student model across in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) datasets. For OOD, we specifically introduce question difficulty as an additional dimension for defining distributional shifts. Our empirical results demonstrate notable improvements, achieving 4%, and 3.2% improvements on ID datasets and, upto 6% and 2.28% on OOD datasets for experts and student models respectively, underscoring the effectiveness of our proposed method in advancing W2S generalization.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Safety and Alignment in LLMs

Research Area Keywords: weak-to-strong generalization, superalignment, Ensemble Learning, multi-LLM Decoding

Contribution Types: Model analysis & interpretability

Languages Studied: N/A

Submission Number: 8428