Social Learning: Towards Collaborative Learning with Large Language Models

ICLR 2025 Conference Submission8072 Authors

26 Sept 2024 (modified: 22 Jan 2025)Submitted to ICLR 2025EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Keywords: language models, privacy-aware knowledge transfer
Abstract: We introduce the framework of "social learning" in the context of large language models (LLMs), whereby models share knowledge with each other in a privacy-aware manner using natural language. We present and evaluate two approaches for knowledge transfer between LLMs. In the first scenario, we allow the model to generate abstract prompts aiming to teach the task. In our second approach, models transfer knowledge by generating synthetic examples. We evaluate these methods across diverse datasets and quantify memorization as a proxy for privacy loss. These techniques inspired by social learning yield promising results with low memorization of the original data. In particular, we show that performance using these methods is comparable to results with the use of original labels and prompts. Our work demonstrates the viability of social learning for LLMs, establishes baseline approaches and highlights several unexplored areas for future work.
Primary Area: generative models
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Submission Number: 8072
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