arXiv Machine Learning By Erfan Loghmani

Aligning Language Models with Observational Data: Opportunities and Risks from a Causal Perspective

Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →

The paper discusses how large language models (LLMs) can be fine‑tuned with observational data to improve alignment with human preferences and business goals. It highlights that directly using such data can cause models to learn spurious correlations, and introduces DeconfoundLM, a method that removes known confounders from reward signals. Experiments show that DeconfoundLM better recovers causal relationships and outperforms baseline methods by over 16% in objective score when confounding is present.

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