In recent years, there has been significant effort to align large language models with human preferences. This work focuses on developing a chatbot specialized in the real estate domain, with an emphasis on incorporating compliant behavior to ensure it can be used without perpetuating discriminatory practices like steering and redlining, which have historically plagued the real estate industry in the United States. Building on prior work, we present a method for generating a synthetic general instruction-following dataset, along with safety data. Through extensive evaluations and benchmarks, we fine-tuned a llama-3-8B-instruct model and demonstrated that we can enhance it’s performance significantly to match huge closed-source models like GPT-4o while making it safer and more compliant. We open-source the model, data and code to support further development and research in the community

In this study, we address the challenge of consistently following emotional support strategies in long conversations by large language models (LLMs). We introduce the Strategy-Relevant Attention (SRA) metric, a model-agnostic measure designed to evaluate the effectiveness of LLMs in adhering to strategic prompts in emotional support contexts. By analyzing conversations within the Emotional Support Conversations dataset (ESConv) using LLaMA models, we demonstrate that SRA is significantly correlated with a model’s ability to sustain the outlined strategy throughout the interactions. Our findings reveal that the application of SRA-informed prompts leads to enhanced strategic adherence, resulting in conversations that more reliably exhibit the desired emotional support strategies over longer conversations. Furthermore, we contribute a comprehensive, multi-branch synthetic conversation dataset for ESConv, featuring a variety of strategy continuations informed by our optimized prompting method. The code and data are publicly available on our Github.