Large Language Models (LLMs) acquire extensive knowledge and remarkable abilities from extensive text corpora, making them powerful tools for various applications. To make LLMs more usable, aligning them with human preferences is essential. Existing alignment techniques, such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), typically embed predefined preferences directly within the model’s parameters. These methods, however, often result in a static alignment that can not account for the diversity of human preferences in practical applications.In response to this challenge, we propose an effective method, MetaAlign, which aims to help LLMs dynamically align with various explicit or implicit preferences specified at inference time. Experimental results show that LLMs optimized on our meticulously constructed MetaAlign Dataset can effectively align with any preferences specified at the inference stage, validating the feasibility of MetaAlign. We hope that our work can provide some insights into the alignment of language models.
Large language models optimized with techniques like RLHF have achieved good alignment in being helpful and harmless. However, post-alignment, these language models often exhibit overconfidence, where the expressed confidence does not accurately calibrate with their correctness rate. In this paper, we decompose the language model confidence into the Uncertainty about the question and the Fidelity to the answer generated by language models. Then, we propose a plug-and-play method, UF Calibration, to estimate the confidence of language models. Our method has shown good calibration performance by conducting experiments with 6 RLHF-LMs on four MCQA datasets. Moreover, we propose two novel metrics, IPR and CE, to evaluate the calibration of the model, and we have conducted a detailed discussion on Truly Well-Calibrated Confidence for large language models. Our method could serve as a strong baseline, and we hope that this work will provide some insights into the model confidence calibration.
The evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to significant advancements, with models like Claude and Gemini capable of processing contexts up to 1 million tokens. However, efficiently handling long sequences remains challenging, particularly during the prefilling stage when input lengths exceed GPU memory capacity. Traditional methods often segment sequence into chunks and compress them iteratively with fixed-size memory. However, our empirical analysis shows that the fixed-size memory results in wasted computational and GPU memory resources. Therefore, we introduces Incremental Memory (IM), a method that starts with a small memory size and gradually increases it, optimizing computational efficiency. Additionally, we propose Decremental Chunk based on Incremental Memory (IMDC), which reduces chunk size while increasing memory size, ensuring stable and lower GPU memory usage. Our experiments demonstrate that IMDC is consistently faster (1.45x) and reduces GPU memory consumption by 23.3% compared to fixed-size memory, achieving comparable performance on the LongBench Benchmark.