Mind the Gap: Examining the Self-Improvement Capabilities of Large Language Models
Keywords: LLM, self-improvement, synthetic data, post-training, test-time optimization
TL;DR: We conduct a comprehensive examination on LLM self-improvement capability via the generation-verification gap.
Abstract: Self-improvement is a mechanism in Large Language Model (LLM) pre-training, post-training and test-time inference. We explore a framework where the model verifies its own outputs, filters or reweights data based on this verification, and distills the filtered data. Despite several empirical successes, a fundamental understanding is still lacking. In this work, we initiate a comprehensive, modular and controlled study on LLM self-improvement. We provide a mathematical formulation for self-improvement, which is largely governed by a quantity which we formalize as the **generation-verification gap**. Through experiments with various model families and tasks, we discover a scaling phenomenon of self-improvement -- a variant of the generation-verification gap scales monotonically with the model pre-training flops. We also examine when self-improvement is possible, an iterative self-improvement procedure, and ways to improve its performance. Our findings not only advance understanding of LLM self-improvement with practical implications, but also open numerous avenues for future research into its capabilities and boundaries.
Primary Area: foundation or frontier models, including LLMs
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Submission Number: 1706
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