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Training Language Models to Self-Correct via Reinforcement Learning

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Re: Training Language Models to Self-Correct via Reinforcement Learning

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are two very different things. One is talking about an improvement made by making control flow changes during inference (no weights updates). The other is talking about using reinforcement learning to do weight updates during training to promote a particular type response. OpenAI had previously used reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF), which essentially relies on manual human scoring as its reward…

No? > I think this submission paper is talking about reinforcement learning as part of/after the main training Reinforcement learning to promote a particular type of self-correction response > They might have done that for O1, but the bigger change is the "runtime train of thought" that once the model received the prompt and before giving a definitive answer, Also reinforcement learning to promote certain reasoning t…

> as part of/after the main training

I take this to mean during weight updates, e.g. training.

> "runtime train of thought"

I take runtime here to mean inference, not during RL. What does runtime mean to you?

Previous approaches [0] successfully used inference time chain of thought to improve model responses. That has nothing to do with RL though.

The grandparent is wrong about the paper. They are doing chain of thought responses during training and doing RL on that to update the weights, not just during inference/runtime.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11903

Re: Training Language Models to Self-Correct via Reinforcement Learning

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you show examples ? In any AI related discussions there are only some claims by people and never examples of the AI working well.

you’re saying you have never seen an example of AI working well?

Yeah, can you show me ?

Re: Training Language Models to Self-Correct via Reinforcement Learning

#93

I found the paper a tad difficult to understand because it spends a lot of time circling around the main thesis instead of directly describing. So, to the best of my understanding: We want to improve LLM's abilities to give correct answers to hard problems. One theory is that we can do that by training a "Self Correcting" behavior into the models where they can take as input a wrong answer and improve it to a better/…

Can you explain what you mean by: "The other, just as valid solution, is to simply improve `Answer 1` and have `Corrected Answer` = `Answer 1`."

Isn't improving "Answer 1" the whole point?

Your write-up makes it sound like "Answer 1" an input but an output from the LLM?

Re: Training Language Models to Self-Correct via Reinforcement Learning

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think that an LLM would spit out Latin and English if you trained it with homo sapiens mumbling? Yet, humans managed to do that (albeit over many generations) Ergo, humans are not just balls of statistics

Not intended to be snarky, but what would you consider them? Is it akin to a function in the mathematical sense, that takes (sensory) input and creates output based on that? If so, how does this function work, if not by statistics? I am genuinely interested in your point of view. Also: Don't you think humans can be somewhat compared to a "pretrained model", as in human genetics gives the brain a head start, so that i…

Not a specialist, but I think each individual is just a small step of gradient descent for the large neural network of humankind.

At our individual scale, we look like a rigid ball of statistics, but at the global scale, we carry a small amount of gradient/delta that pushes humankind in a broader direction.

LLMs have been able to reproduce the former, it is unclear how they can contribute to/replicate the latter.

Re: Training Language Models to Self-Correct via Reinforcement Learning

#95
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this submission paper is talking about reinforcement learning as part of/after the main training, then the model does inference as normal. They might have done that for O1, but the bigger change is the "runtime train of thought" that once the model received the prompt and before giving a definitive answer, it "thinks" with words and readjusts at runtime. At least that's my understanding from these two approac…

They are indeed similar and OpenAI did indeed use RL at training time in a way that has not been done before, as does this approach. Yes both also involve some additional inference-time generation, but the problem is that (at least as of now) you can't get standard LLMs to actually do well with extra inference-time generation unless you have a training process that uses RL to teach them to do so effectively. I'm work…

For what it's worth, here's the post I was referring to: https://www.airtrain.ai/blog/how-openai-o1-changes-the-llm-t...

HN discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41723384

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