ARES: Alternating Reinforcement Learning and Supervised Fine-Tuning for Enhanced Multi-Modal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Through Diverse AI Feedback

Ju-Seung Byun, Jiyun Chun, Jihyung Kil, Andrew Perrault


Abstract
Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) excel at comprehending human instructions and demonstrate remarkable results across a broad spectrum of tasks. Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and AI Feedback (RLAIF) further refine LLMs by aligning them with specific preferences. These methods primarily use ranking-based feedback for entire generations. With advanced AI models (Teacher), such as GPT-4 and Claude 3 Opus, we can request various types of detailed feedback that are expensive for humans to provide. We propose a two-stage algorithm ARES that Alternates REinforcement Learning (RL) and Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). First, we ask the Teacher to score how much each sentence contributes to solving the problem in a Chain-of-Thought (CoT). This sentence-level feedback allows us to consider individual valuable segments, providing more granular rewards for the RL procedure. Second, we ask the Teacher to correct wrong reasoning after the RL stage. The RL procedure requires substantial hyperparameter tuning and often generates errors such as repetitive words and incomplete sentences. With correction feedback, we stabilize the RL fine-tuned model through SFT. We conduct experiments on the multi-modal datasets ScienceQA and A-OKVQA to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposal. The ARES rationale achieves around 70% win rate compared to baseline models judged by GPT-4o. Additionally, we observe that the improved rationale reasoning leads to a 2.5% increase in inference answer accuracy on average for the multi-modal datasets.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.252
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4410–4430
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.252
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ju-Seung Byun, Jiyun Chun, Jihyung Kil, and Andrew Perrault. 2024. ARES: Alternating Reinforcement Learning and Supervised Fine-Tuning for Enhanced Multi-Modal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Through Diverse AI Feedback. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 4410–4430, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ARES: Alternating Reinforcement Learning and Supervised Fine-Tuning for Enhanced Multi-Modal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Through Diverse AI Feedback (Byun et al., EMNLP 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.252.pdf
Software:
 2024.emnlp-main.252.software.zip