Human-Instruction-Free LLM Self-Alignment with Limited Samples

ICLR 2025 Conference Submission9511 Authors

27 Sept 2024 (modified: 02 Dec 2024)ICLR 2025 Conference SubmissionEveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Keywords: LLM, Self-Alignment, ICL
Abstract: Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values is a vital task for LLM practitioners. Current alignment techniques have several limitations: (1) requiring a large amount of annotated data; (2) demanding heavy human involvement; (3) lacking a systematic mechanism to continuously improve. In this work, we study aligning LLMs to a new domain with limited samples (e.g. < 100). We propose an algorithm that can \textit{self-align} LLMs \textit{iteratively} without active human involvement. Unlike existing works, our algorithm relies on neither human-crafted instructions nor labeled rewards, significantly reducing human involvement. In addition, our algorithm can self-improve the alignment continuously. The key idea is to first retrieve high-quality samples related to the target domain and use them as In-context Learning examples to generate more samples. Then we use the \textit{self-generated} samples to finetune the LLM iteratively. We show that our method can unlock the LLMs' self-generalization ability to perform alignment with near-zero human supervision. We test our algorithm on three benchmarks in safety, truthfulness, and instruction-following, and show good performance in alignment, domain adaptability, and scalability.
Primary Area: alignment, fairness, safety, privacy, and societal considerations
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Submission Number: 9511
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