trlX: A Framework for Large Scale Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback
Alexander Havrilla, Maksym Zhuravinskyi, Duy Phung, Aman Tiwari, Jonathan Tow, Stella Biderman, Quentin Anthony, Louis Castricato
Abstract
Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) utilizes human feedback to better align large language models with human preferences via online optimization against a learned reward model. Current RLHF paradigms rely on Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), which quickly becomes a challenge to implement and scale up to large architectures. To address this difficulty we present the AutoRLHF library as a feature complete open-source framework for RLHF fine-tuning of models up to and exceeding 70 billion parameters. To do so we implement support for multiple types of distributed training including distributed data parallel, model sharded, as well as tensor, sequential, and pipeline parallelism. Additionally, we implement compute and memory saving features, giving AutoRLHF the flexibility to support users with a wide range of compute resources. This includes offline RL methods like Implicit Language Q Learning (ILQL) as a compute efficient alternative to PPO. We find offline fine-tuning offers competitive performance relative to online algorithms while being easier to implement, train, and scale. To evaluate our framework we train RLHF models on two separate well-known tasks using publicly available human preference data. Models trained with AutoRLHF achieve preference win-rates over baselines at rates comparable to the original works.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.emnlp-main.530
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
- Month:
- December
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Singapore
- Editors:
- Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
- Venue:
- EMNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 8578–8595
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.530
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.530
- Cite (ACL):
- Alexander Havrilla, Maksym Zhuravinskyi, Duy Phung, Aman Tiwari, Jonathan Tow, Stella Biderman, Quentin Anthony, and Louis Castricato. 2023. trlX: A Framework for Large Scale Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 8578–8595, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- trlX: A Framework for Large Scale Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (Havrilla et al., EMNLP 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/dois-2013-emnlp/2023.emnlp-main.530.pdf