Towards Helpful and Harmless Advice-Seeking Question Answering with Collective Intelligence

Core Concepts

AdvisorQA, the first benchmark for evaluating and enhancing the capabilities of large language models in offering personalized, actionable, and empathetic advice based on deeply personalized experiences.

Abstract

The paper introduces AdvisorQA, a dataset for advice-seeking question answering that focuses on questions rooted in personalized experiences and the corresponding advice, ranked by collective intelligence. The key highlights are:

AdvisorQA is designed to address the challenges in evaluating subjective helpfulness, which is not determined by objective criteria like correctness, but rather by personal preferences. It leverages the upvote ranking from the LifeProTips subreddit forum as a proxy for majority preference.

The dataset contains 10,350 advice-seeking questions with an average of 8.9 answers per question, reflecting the diverse perspectives on subjective issues. The questions are highly complex, with an average length of 75.2 tokens, covering a wide range of daily life topics.

The paper proposes two evaluation metrics - helpfulness and harmlessness. The helpfulness metric is based on the Plackett-Luce model, which can effectively rank the advice according to the majority preference. The harmlessness metric uses the LifeTox moderator to assess the safety of the advice.

Baseline experiments are conducted with popular language models, including GPT-3.5, GPT-4, Flan-T5, Llama, and Mistral. The results show that while larger models tend to be more helpful, they can also be less harmless. Fine-tuning the models with supervised learning and reinforcement learning further reveals the trade-off between helpfulness and harmlessness.

The analysis of the trained models suggests that different training approaches, such as Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and Direct Policy Optimization (DPO), lead to diverse characteristics in the generated advice, with PPO models being more diverse but less safe, and DPO models being more aligned with the demonstrations but less diverse.

The AdvisorQA benchmark and the insights from the experiments mark a significant step towards enhancing question answering systems for providing personalized, empathetic, and safe advice, showcasing the improved understanding of human subjectivity by large language models.

Stats

The average number of answers per advice-seeking question is 8.9.
The top-ranked advice receives an average of 71.4 upvotes, and the total upvotes for all advice in each thread is 164.2.
The average token length of the advice-seeking questions is 75.2.

Quotes

"As the integration of large language models into daily life is on the rise, there is a clear gap in benchmarks for advising on subjective and personal dilemmas."
"AdvisorQA marks a significant leap in enhancing QA systems for providing personalized, empathetic advice, showcasing LLMs' improved understanding of human subjectivity."

Key Insights Distilled From

AdvisorQA: Towards Helpful and Harmless Advice-seeking Question Answering with Collective Intelligence

by Minbeom Kim,... at arxiv.org 04-19-2024

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.11826.pdf

Deeper Inquiries

How can the AdvisorQA benchmark be extended to capture the diverse values and preferences of different social groups and cultures?

To extend the AdvisorQA benchmark to capture the diverse values and preferences of different social groups and cultures, several key steps can be taken:

Diverse Data Collection: Expand the dataset to include advice-seeking questions and responses from a wide range of cultural backgrounds, social groups, and demographics. This will help in capturing a more diverse set of values and preferences.

Annotation Diversity: Ensure that the annotation process for labeling helpfulness and harmlessness considers diverse perspectives. This can involve annotators from different cultural backgrounds to provide a more inclusive evaluation.

Multilingual Support: Incorporate multilingual support in the benchmark to cater to different language speakers and regions. This will enable the evaluation of language models across various linguistic and cultural contexts.

Community Engagement: Collaborate with diverse communities to gather feedback on the benchmark and incorporate their insights into the evaluation process. This can help in understanding the nuances of different cultural values.

Fine-Grained Evaluation Metrics: Develop fine-grained evaluation metrics that can capture the nuances of diverse values and preferences. This may involve incorporating cultural sensitivity, ethical considerations, and context-specific evaluation criteria.

By implementing these strategies, the AdvisorQA benchmark can be extended to better capture the diverse values and preferences of different social groups and cultures, making it more inclusive and representative of a global audience.

What are the potential risks and ethical considerations in deploying large language models as neural advisors in real-world applications, and how can they be mitigated?

Deploying large language models as neural advisors in real-world applications comes with several potential risks and ethical considerations that need to be addressed:

Bias and Fairness: Large language models may perpetuate biases present in the data they are trained on, leading to unfair or discriminatory advice. Mitigation involves bias detection, data preprocessing, and fairness-aware training to ensure equitable outcomes.

Privacy Concerns: Neural advisors may handle sensitive personal data, raising privacy concerns. Implementing robust data protection measures, anonymization techniques, and secure data handling protocols can mitigate privacy risks.

Harmful Advice: There is a risk of neural advisors providing harmful or unethical advice, especially in subjective domains. Incorporating harmlessness metrics, ethical guidelines, and human oversight can help mitigate this risk.

Lack of Transparency: Large language models are often complex and lack transparency in their decision-making processes. Enhancing model interpretability, providing explanations for advice, and transparency in model behavior can address this concern.

Accountability and Responsibility: Establishing clear accountability for the advice provided by neural advisors is crucial. Implementing mechanisms for tracking model performance, handling errors, and ensuring human oversight can enhance accountability.

Mitigating these risks and ethical considerations involves a combination of technical solutions, ethical guidelines, regulatory compliance, and ongoing monitoring of model behavior in real-world applications.

How can the insights from the analysis of training approaches, such as the trade-off between helpfulness and harmlessness, inform the development of more advanced text generation techniques for subjective domains?

The insights from the analysis of training approaches, particularly the trade-off between helpfulness and harmlessness, can inform the development of more advanced text generation techniques for subjective domains in the following ways:

Balanced Objective Functions: Incorporate a balanced objective function that considers both helpfulness and harmlessness in the training process. This can help in optimizing models for providing safe and beneficial advice.

Controllable Generation: Explore controllable text generation techniques that allow for fine-tuning the output based on specific criteria such as empathy, ethics, or cultural sensitivity. This can enable more nuanced and tailored advice generation.

Ethical Guidelines: Develop ethical guidelines and constraints for text generation models to ensure that the generated advice aligns with ethical standards and does not promote harmful behaviors. This can be integrated into the training process to enforce ethical considerations.

Human-in-the-Loop Approaches: Implement human-in-the-loop approaches where human oversight is involved in validating the advice generated by the models. This can help in ensuring that the advice is both helpful and safe for users.

Continuous Evaluation: Establish a framework for continuous evaluation of text generation models in subjective domains, focusing on both helpfulness and harmlessness. This iterative feedback loop can drive improvements in model performance and ethical behavior.

By leveraging these insights and incorporating them into the development of text generation techniques, researchers can create more advanced and responsible neural advisors that cater to the diverse needs and preferences of users in subjective domains.