Towards Tool Use Alignment of Large Language Models

Zhi-Yuan Chen, Shiqi Shen, Guangyao Shen, Gong Zhi, Xu Chen, Yankai Lin


Abstract
Recently, tool use with LLMs has become one of the primary research topics as it can help LLM generate truthful and helpful responses. Existing studies on tool use with LLMs primarily focus on enhancing the tool-calling ability of LLMs. In practice, like chat assistants, LLMs are also required to align with human values in the context of tool use. Specifically, LLMs should refuse to answer unsafe tool use relevant instructions and insecure tool responses to ensure their reliability and harmlessness. At the same time, LLMs should demonstrate autonomy in tool use to reduce the costs associated with tool calling. To tackle this issue, we first introduce the principle that LLMs should follow in tool use scenarios: H2A. The goal of H2A is to align LLMs with **helpfulness**, **harmlessness**, and **autonomy**. In addition, we propose ToolAlign, a dataset comprising instruction-tuning data and preference data to align LLMs with the H2A principle for tool use. Based on ToolAlign, we develop LLMs by supervised fine-tuning and preference learning, and experimental results demonstrate that the LLMs exhibit remarkable tool-calling capabilities, while also refusing to engage with harmful content, and displaying a high degree of autonomy in tool utilization. The code and datasets are available at: https://github.com/zhiyuanc2001/ToolAlign.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.82
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:
1382–1400
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.82
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhi-Yuan Chen, Shiqi Shen, Guangyao Shen, Gong Zhi, Xu Chen, and Yankai Lin. 2024. Towards Tool Use Alignment of Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1382–1400, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards Tool Use Alignment of Large Language Models (Chen et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.82.pdf