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arXiv:2203.02155cs.CL

Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback

Long Ouyang, Jeff Wu, Xu Jiang, Diogo Almeida, Carroll L. Wainwright, Pamela Mishkin, Chong Zhang, Sandhini Agarwal, Katarina Slama, Alex Ray, John Schulman, Jacob Hilton, Fraser Kelton, Luke Miller, Maddie Simens, Amanda Askell, Peter Welinder, Paul Christiano, Jan Leike, Ryan Lowe

Abstract

Making language models bigger does not inherently make them better at following a user's intent. For example, large language models can generate outputs that are untruthful, toxic, or simply not helpful to the user. In other words, these models are not aligned with their users. In this paper, we show an avenue for aligning language models with user intent on a wide range of tasks by fine-tuning with human feedback. Starting with a set of labeler-written prompts and prompts submitted through the OpenAI API, we collect a dataset of labeler demonstrations of the desired model behavior, which we use to fine-tune GPT-3 using supervised learning. We then collect a dataset of rankings of model outputs, which we use to further fine-tune this supervised model using reinforcement learning from human feedback. We call the resulting models InstructGPT. In human evaluations on our prompt distribution, outputs from the 1.3B parameter InstructGPT model are preferred to outputs from the 175B GPT-3, despite having 100x fewer parameters. Moreover, InstructGPT models show improvements in truthfulness and reductions in toxic output generation while having minimal performance regressions on public NLP datasets. Even though InstructGPT still makes simple mistakes, our results show that fine-tuning with human feedback is a promising direction for aligning language models with human intent.

arXiv comments
Journal reference
DOI
Subjects
cs.CLComputation and Language cs.AIArtificial Intelligence cs.LGMachine Learning

On Hacker News

Linked by 23 identifiable commenters in 26 comments across 25 threads, from Oct 2022 to Sep 2026. Found in 3 HN submissions from Dec 2022 to Apr 2023. Open submission discussions.

Comments linking this paper, per year.

Discussed in comments25 threads

    • 4th author on "Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback" https://arxiv.org/html/2203.02155v1. Pure lie?

      refulgentisView on HNParent context

    • I helped train some of the first "magic" models at OpenAI[1] and it was a wild ride. We were a pretty sane + skeptical team and we weren't totally convinced the models were as general as they seemed, but the query that convinced me (and later got included in the paper[2]) was…

      CompleteSkepticView on HNParent context

    • Jack has a lot of really bad takes and frequently makes lots of mistakes. Honestly, I don't know why people take him seriously. I mean you can go read his blog post that's pinned where he argues that there's no new ideas and it is all data. He makes the argument that…

      godelskiView on HNParent context

  1. Safe Superintelligence Inc. 1 comment
    • I personally find that summary of things to be way off the mark (for example, hopefully "the face" you reference isn't based on anything that appears in a browser window or in an ensemble of less than 100 agents!) but I'll try to speak to the "united" question instead. 1. The…

      bborView on HNParent context

    • > Usage data: ChatGPT is said to generate on the order of 10 billion tokens of data per day – even before they opened their more compelling GPT-4o model to free users. > Common Crawl (filtered) 410 billion tokens 60% of GPT-3 training data but only 44% of it was used i.e. 0.44…

      throwaway4adayView on HNParent context

  2. ChatGPT’s system prompts 1 comment
    • If I understand correctly, the older method you describe has been replaced by exposing a GPT model to some further training (as opposed to "pre-training") with successful conversations. I think this premiered with the InstructGPT paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.02155.pdf

      simbolitView on HNParent context

    • Instruction fine tuning definitely increases the win rate in human judged comparisons but that just means it's better at generating a style humans like. Humans aren't always right. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.02155.pdf Page 56/68 in table 14 it looks like the things the fine…

      superkuhView on HNParent context

  3. How RLHF Works 2 comments
    • It's not the first paper on the topic IIRC, but OpenAI's InstructGPT paper [0] is decent and references enough other material to get started. The key idea is that they're able to start with large amounts of relatively garbage unsupervised data (the internet), and use that model…

      hansvmView on HNParent context

    • Blog post from Huggingface: https://huggingface.co/blog/rlhf Webinar on the same topic (from same HF folks): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MBJOuVq380&t=496s RLHF as used by OpenAI in InstructGPT (predecessor to ChatGPT): https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.02155 (academic paper, so…

      senkoView on HNParent context

    • From OpenAI's RLHF paper[1]: "By default, when we train a PPO model on our API distribution, it suffers from an “alignment tax”, as its performance on several public NLP datasets decreases." On the HELM[2] site, you can see accuracy benchmarks for InstructGPT <OpenAI model> vs…

      vellumView on HNParent context

    • There's a good slide I saw in Andrej Karpathy's talk[1] at build the other day. It's from a paper talking about training for InstructGPT[2]. Direct link to the figure[3]. The main instruction for people doing the task is: "You will also be given several text outputs, intended to…

      joshkaView on HNParent context

  4. Has ChatGPT Been Neutered? 1 comment
    • It's the "alignment tax". From OpenAI's RLHF paper[1]: "By default, when we train a PPO model on our API distribution, it suffers from an “alignment tax”, as its performance on several public NLP datasets decreases." On the HELM[2] site, you can see accuracy benchmarks for…

      vellumView on HNParent context

    • I am not an expert but as others have said, the InstructGPT and Alpaca models do that https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.02155# https://crfm.stanford.edu/2023/03/13/alpaca.html

      seydorView on HNParent context

    • It just hasn't been prompted or fine-tuned to have the neutral, self effacing personality of ChatGPT. It's doing the pure, "try to guess the most likely next token" task on which they were both trained (https://heartbeat.comet.ml/causal-language-modeling-with-gpt...). ChatGPT is…

      make3View on HNParent context

    • Reinforcement learning in general didn't come out of AI alignment work, but RHLF in particular did. The initial idea and paper [1] were from AI alignment folks, as was most of the later development [2][3][4][5]. Overview…

      jefftkView on HNParent context

    • InstructGPT (which ChatGPT/GPT-3.5) is based on was trained from scratch: > We train three model sizes (1.3B, 6B, and 175B parameters)[1] It does use the same model architecture as GPT-3 though so I guess there is a bit of reasoning there maybe. [1]…

      nlView on HNParent context

    • Because there are many benchmarks that measure different things. You need to look at the benchmark that reflects your specific interest. So in this case ("I wasn't impressed that 30B didn't seem to know who Captain Picard was") the closest relevant benchmark they performed is…

      nlView on HNParent context

    • I kind of doubt it? https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.02155 it says > outputs from the 1.3B parameter InstructGPT model are preferred to outputs from the 175B GPT-3, despite having 100x fewer parameters

      estView on HNParent context

    • it is a result of trying to align the AI model after it has been trained using self-supervised learning with an addition human feedback step. OpenAI has a model / process called InstructLM or InstructGPT see e.g. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.10496.pdf…

      yayrView on HNParent context

    • Instruction tuning mostly relies on the quality of the data you put into the model. This makes it different from traditional language model training: essentially you take one of these existing hugely expensive models (there are lots of them already out there), and tune them…

      mattalexView on HNParent context

    • > Technically, they aren't trained that way, their opposite recognition AI is trained that way. No, they are trained that way. These aren't GANs or anything resembling that. There is a reinforcement model that is build from expert human guidance which is then used to fine-tune…

      nlView on HNParent context

    • chatGPT is simply a GPT model fine-tuned in an instruction oriented way to align with human-rated helpfulness, truthfulness, and harmlessness as a reward signal. The diagram on the chatGPT blogpost is literally the same diagram in the March 2022 paper…

      imranqView on HNParent context

    • > they might have a big base of predefined response "templates" This could the result of overfitting on the human feedback that it was trained on [1]. [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.02155.pdf

      blackbear_View on HNParent context

    • BLOOM[0] is another 176B multilingual open-source model whose weights were published. However, running it locally requires 8 A6000 GPUs. The GPU cost alone is roughly $37K. Also, there is the concern of performance. The Chinchilla[1] paper indicates that most model sizes trained…

      espadrineView on HNParent context

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