Andrea Michi


2024

pdf
Conditional Language Policy: A General Framework For Steerable Multi-Objective Finetuning
Kaiwen Wang | Rahul Kidambi | Ryan Sullivan | Alekh Agarwal | Christoph Dann | Andrea Michi | Marco Gelmi | Yunxuan Li | Raghav Gupta | Kumar Avinava Dubey | Alexandre Rame | Johan Ferret | Geoffrey Cideron | Le Hou | Hongkun Yu | Amr Ahmed | Aranyak Mehta | Leonard Hussenot | Olivier Bachem | Edouard Leurent
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024

Reward-based finetuning is crucial for aligning language policies with intended behaviors (*e.g.*, creativity and safety). A key challenge is to develop steerable language models that trade-off multiple (conflicting) objectives in a flexible and efficient manner. This paper presents Conditional Language Policy (CLP), a general framework for finetuning language models on multiple objectives. Building on techniques from multi-task training and parameter-efficient finetuning, CLP learn steerable models that effectively trade-off conflicting objectives at *inference time*. Notably, this does not require training or maintaining multiple models to achieve different trade-offs between the objectives. Through extensive experiments and ablations on two summarization datasets, we show that CLP learns steerable language models that outperform and Pareto-dominate the existing approaches for multi-objective