Paper ID: 2406.11275

Self-training Large Language Models through Knowledge Detection

Wei Jie Yeo, Teddy Ferdinan, Przemyslaw Kazienko, Ranjan Satapathy, Erik Cambria

Large language models (LLMs) often necessitate extensive labeled datasets and training compute to achieve impressive performance across downstream tasks. This paper explores a self-training paradigm, where the LLM autonomously curates its own labels and selectively trains on unknown data samples identified through a reference-free consistency method. Empirical evaluations demonstrate significant improvements in reducing hallucination in generation across multiple subjects. Furthermore, the selective training framework mitigates catastrophic forgetting in out-of-distribution benchmarks, addressing a critical limitation in training LLMs. Our findings suggest that such an approach can substantially reduce the dependency on large labeled datasets, paving the way for more scalable and cost-effective language model training.

Submitted: Jun 17, 2024