PURE: Aligning LLM via Pluggable Query Reformulation for Enhanced Helpfulness

Wenjin Yao, Yidong Wang, Zhuohao Yu, Rui Xie, Shikun Zhang, Wei Ye


Abstract
Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values and preferences is a significant challenge. Training-based methods, such as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and direct preference optimization (DPO), require substantial resources and are impractical for API-based LLMs. Post-processing methods decouple alignment from training but may incur high multiple-time inference costs or rely on less knowledgeable lightweight models for response refinement. In this paper, we propose a new LLM alignment paradigm from the perspective of pre-processing. By reformulating risky queries into highly relevant yet harmless ones before feeding them into LLMs, our method eliminates the high costs of training base LLMs, efficiently applies to both open-source and proprietary LLMs, and achieves a promising balance of harmlessness and helpfulness. For example, with Vicuna-7B as the LLM to align, it enhances helpfulness by 28.52% over DPO while maintaining comparable harmlessness levels. When applied to Gemini-1.5-pro, it increased harmlessness and helpfulness by 7.04% and 29.37%, respectively.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.509
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8721–8744
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.509
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-emnlp.509
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wenjin Yao, Yidong Wang, Zhuohao Yu, Rui Xie, Shikun Zhang, and Wei Ye. 2024. PURE: Aligning LLM via Pluggable Query Reformulation for Enhanced Helpfulness. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 8721–8744, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
PURE: Aligning LLM via Pluggable Query Reformulation for Enhanced Helpfulness (Yao et al., Findings 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/dois-2013-emnlp/2024.findings-emnlp.509.pdf
Data:
 2024.findings-emnlp.509.data.zip