Recent calls for pluralistic alignment emphasize that AI systems should address the diverse needs of all people. Yet, efforts in this space often require sorting people into fixed buckets of pre-specified diversity-defining dimensions (e.g., demographics), risking smoothing out individualistic variations or even stereotyping. To achieve an authentic representation of diversity that respects individuality, we propose individualistic alignment. While individualistic alignment can take various forms, in this paper, we introduce IndieValueCatalog, a dataset transformed from the influential World Values Survey (WVS), to study language models (LMs) on the specific challenge of individualistic value reasoning. Given a sample of an individual’s value-expressing statements, models are tasked with predicting their value judgments in novel cases. With IndieValueCatalog, we reveal critical limitations in frontier LMs’ abilities to predict individualistic values with accuracies only ranging between 55% to 65%. Moreover, our results highlight that a precise description of individualistic values cannot be approximated only via demographic information. Finally, we train a series of IndieValueReasoners to reveal new patterns and dynamics into global human values.

Modelling human variation in rating tasks is crucial for enabling AI systems for personalization, pluralistic model alignment, and computational social science. We propose representing individuals using value profiles – natural language descriptions of underlying values compressed from in-context demonstrations – along with a steerable decoder model to estimate ratings conditioned on a value profile or other rater information. To measure the predictive information in rater representations, we introduce an information-theoretic methodology. We find that demonstrations contain the most information, followed by value profiles and then demographics. However, value profiles offer advantages in terms of scrutability, interpretability, and steerability due to their compressed natural language format. Value profiles effectively compress the useful information from demonstrations (70% information preservation). Furthermore, clustering value profiles to identify similarly behaving individuals better explains rater variation than the most predictive demographic groupings. Going beyond test set performance, we show that the decoder models interpretably change ratings according to semantic profile differences, are well-calibrated, and can help explain instance-level disagreement by simulating an annotator population. These results demonstrate that value profiles offer novel, predictive ways to describe individual variation beyond demographics or group information.

High-quality training data has proven crucial for developing performant large language models (LLMs). However, commercial LLM providers disclose few, if any, details about the data used for training. This lack of transparency creates multiple challenges: it limits external oversight and inspection of LLMs for issues such as copyright infringement, it undermines the agency of data authors, and it hinders scientific research on critical issues such as data contamination and data selection. How can we recover what training data is known to LLMs? In this work we demonstrate a new method to identify training data known to proprietary LLMs like GPT-4 without requiring any access to model weights or token probabilities, by using information-guided probes. Our work builds on a key observation: text passages with high surprisal are good search material for memorization probes. By evaluating a model’s ability to successfully reconstruct high-surprisal tokens in text, we can identify a surprising number of texts memorized by LLMs.

Many natural language processing (NLP) tasks involve subjectivity, ambiguity, or legitimate disagreement between annotators. In this paper, we outline our system for modeling human variation. Our system leverages language models’ (LLMs) in-context learning abilities, along with a two-step meta-learning training procedure for 1) post-training on many datasets requiring in-context learning and 2) specializing the model via in-context meta-learning to the particular data distribution of interest. We also evaluate the performance of our system submission to the Learning With Disagreements (LeWiDi) competition, where it was the overall winner on both tasks. Additionally, we perform an ablation study to measure the importance of each system component. We find that including rater examples in-context is crucial for our system’s performance, dataset-specific fine-tuning is helpful on the larger datasets, post-training on other in-context datasets is helpful on one of the competition datasets, and that performance improves with model scale.

While existing alignment paradigms have been integral in developing large language models (LLMs), LLMs often learn an averaged human preference and struggle to model diverse preferences across cultures, demographics, and communities. We propose Modular Pluralism, a modular framework based on multi-LLM collaboration for pluralistic alignment: it “plugs into” a base LLM a pool of smaller but specialized community LMs, where models collaborate in distinct modes to flexibility support three modes of pluralism: Overton, steerable, and distributional. Modular Pluralism is uniquely compatible with black-box LLMs and offers the modular control of adding new community LMs for previously underrepresented communities. We evaluate Modular Pluralism with six tasks and four datasets featuring questions/instructions with value-laden and perspective-informed responses. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Modular Pluralism advances the three pluralism objectives across six black-box and open-source LLMs. Further analysis reveals that LLMs are generally faithful to the inputs from smaller community LLMs, allowing seamless patching by adding a new community LM to better cover previously underrepresented communities.

We present Impossible Distillation, a novel framework for paraphrasing and sentence summarization, that distills a high-quality dataset and model from a low-quality teacher that itself cannot perform these tasks. Unlike prior works that rely on an extreme-scale teacher model (e.g., GPT3) or task-specific architecture, we hypothesize and verify the paraphrastic proximity intrinsic to pre-trained LMs (e.g., GPT2), where paraphrases occupy a proximal subspace in the LM distribution. By identifying and distilling generations from these subspaces, Impossible Distillation produces a high-quality dataset and model even from GPT2-scale LMs. We evaluate our method on multiple benchmarks spanning unconstrained / syntax-controlled paraphrase generation and sentence summarization. Our model with 770M parameters consistently outperforms strong baselines, including models distilled from ChatGPT, and sometimes, even ChatGPT itself. Also, we find that our distilled dataset from 1.5B LMs exhibits higher diversity and fidelity than up to 13 times larger datasets.

We present NovaCOMET, an open commonsense knowledge model, that combines the best aspects of knowledge and general task models. Compared to previous knowledge models, NovaCOMET allows open-format relations enabling direct application to reasoning tasks; compared to general task models like Flan-T5, it explicitly centers knowledge, enabling superior performance for commonsense reasoning. NovaCOMET leverages the knowledge of opaque proprietary models to create an open knowledge pipeline. First, knowledge is symbolically distilled into NovATOMIC, a publicly-releaseddiscrete knowledge graph which can be audited, critiqued, and filtered. Next, we train NovaCOMET on NovATOMIC by fine-tuning an open-source pretrained model. NovaCOMET uses an open-format training objective, replacing the fixed relation sets of past knowledge models, enabling arbitrary structures within the data to serve as inputs or outputs. The resulting generation model, optionally augmented with human annotation, matches or exceeds comparable open task models like Flan-T5 on a range of commonsense generation tasks. NovaCOMET serves as a counterexample to the contemporary focus on instruction tuning only, demonstrating a distinct advantage to explicitly modeling commonsense knowledge as well.

Data augmentation is an important method for evaluating the robustness of and enhancing the diversity of training data for natural language processing (NLP) models. In this paper, we present NL-Augmenter, a new participatory Python-based natural language (NL) augmentation framework which supports the creation of transformations (modifications to the data) and filters (data splits according to specific features). We describe the framework and an initial set of 117 transformations and 23 filters for a variety of NL tasks annotated with noisy descriptive tags. The transformations incorporate noise, intentional and accidental human mistakes, socio-linguistic variation, semantically-valid style, syntax changes, as well as artificial constructs that are unambiguous to humans. We demonstrate the efficacy of NL-Augmenter by using its transformations to analyze the robustness of popular language models. We find different models to be differently challenged on different tasks, with quasi-systematic score decreases. The infrastructure, datacards, and robustness evaluation results are publicly available on GitHub for the benefit of researchers working on paraphrase generation, robustness analysis, and low-resource NLP.

Pre-trained language models derive substantial linguistic and factual knowledge from the massive corpora on which they are trained, and prompt engineering seeks to align these models to specific tasks. Unfortunately, existing prompt engineering methods require significant amounts of labeled data, access to model parameters, or both. We introduce a new method for selecting prompt templates without labeled examples and without direct access to the model. Specifically, over a set of candidate templates, we choose the template that maximizes the mutual information between the input and the corresponding model output. Across 8 datasets representing 7 distinct NLP tasks, we show that when a template has high mutual information, it also has high accuracy on the task. On the largest model, selecting prompts with our method gets 90% of the way from the average prompt accuracy to the best prompt accuracy and requires no ground truth labels.

We explore the idea of compressing the prompts used to condition language models, and show that compressed prompts can retain a substantive amount of information about the original prompt. For severely compressed prompts, while fine-grained information is lost, abstract information and general sentiments can be retained with surprisingly few parameters, which can be useful in the context of decode-time algorithms for controllability and toxicity reduction. We find that some complex prompts can be effectively compressed into a single token to guide generation. We also show that compressed prompts are largely compositional, and can be constructed such that they can be used to control independent aspects of generated text.