Quality-Diversity through AI Feedback

Herbie Bradley, Andrew Dai, Hannah Benita Teufel, Jenny Zhang, Koen Oostermeijer, Marco Bellagente, Jeff Clune, Kenneth Stanley, Gregory Schott, Joel Lehman

Code Of Ethics: I acknowledge that I and all co-authors of this work have read and commit to adhering to the ICLR Code of Ethics.

Keywords: quality diversity, large language models, derivative-free optimization, AI feedback

Submission Guidelines: I certify that this submission complies with the submission instructions as described on https://iclr.cc/Conferences/2024/AuthorGuide.

Abstract: In many text-generation problems, users may prefer not only a single response, but a diverse range of high-quality outputs from which to choose. Quality-diversity (QD) search algorithms aim at such outcomes, by continually improving and diversifying a population of candidates. However, the applicability of QD to qualitative domains, like creative writing, has been limited by the difficulty of algorithmically specifying measures of quality and diversity. Interestingly, recent developments in language models (LMs) have enabled guiding search through \emph{AI feedback}, wherein LMs are prompted in natural language to evaluate qualitative aspects of text. Leveraging this development, we introduce Quality-Diversity through AI Feedback (QDAIF), wherein an evolutionary algorithm applies LMs to both generate variation and evaluate the quality and diversity of candidate text. When assessed on creative writing domains, QDAIF covers more of a specified search space with high-quality samples than do non-QD controls. Further, human evaluation of QDAIF-generated creative texts validates reasonable agreement between AI and human evaluation. Our results thus highlight the potential of AI feedback to guide open-ended search for creative and original solutions, providing a recipe that seemingly generalizes to many domains and modalities. In this way, QDAIF is a step towards AI systems that can independently search, diversify, evaluate, and improve, which are among the core skills underlying human society's capacity for innovation.

Anonymous Url: I certify that there is no URL (e.g., github page) that could be used to find authors' identity.

No Acknowledgement Section: I certify that there is no acknowledgement section in this submission for double blind review.

Primary Area: generative models

Submission Number: 6013