Last year saw a boom of LLMs research. Based on the research, one important lesson would be that we should devote most of our efforts to training a general-purpose LLM base model, and leverage it as much as possible after all. I might be opinionated, but I always believe that one general principle is that we need to respect the base model’s capability during alignment. This argument might be common sense among many people, but it is still controversial among others, especially when it comes to the boundary between capability and alignment. Feel free to correct me if you have more solid empirical evidence.

In this post, I will first define model capability and alignment respectively. Then I will discuss capability and alignment boundaries. I will also show some evidence on LLM capabilities coming from the base model and explain why. Based on this, I will introduce some principles to respect base model capability during each method of alignment. Finally, I emphasize the importance of evaluation used to show the effectiveness of our principle.

All the arguments are based on the goal that base model construction and alignment is to get a general purpose model, chatbot and A(G)I, or at least a specialist that behaves properly in real-world cases, instead of optimizing performance on any specific tasks and domains or performance on benchmarks.

What’s Alignment?

The alignment problem is defined as “How can we create agents that behave in accordance with the user’s intentions” [25]. In the context of LLM, “agent” could be the language model itself, or the LLM augmented with tools, memories and planning/reasoning abilities as a whole. The “intentions” could be explicit or implicit. Explicit intentions could be requirements expressed in the natural language instructions, while implicit intentions are numerous and hard to be captured by limited objectives or natural language, like “do not be toxic” etc. [26] Those implicit intents could also be ambiguous and diverse, or even inconsistent among different people. Many people currently classify them into three main alignment directions: Helpfulness (Implicit Intent and Explicit Instruction Following), Harmlessness (Safety) and Honesty (Truthfulness and less Hallucinations). In this sense, alignment is more like a goal instead of a method. To achieve the goal of alignment, there could be many methods. The most effectiv...

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