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arXiv · 2404.03820

CantTalkAboutThis: Aligning Language Models to Stay on Topic in Dialogues

Makesh Narsimhan Sreedhar·Traian Rebedea·Shaona Ghosh·Jiaqi Zeng·Christopher Parisien
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Abstract

Recent advancements in instruction-tuning datasets have predominantly focused on specific tasks like mathematical or logical reasoning. There has been a notable gap in data designed for aligning language models to maintain topic relevance in conversations - a critical aspect for deploying chatbots to production. We introduce the CantTalkAboutThis dataset to help language models remain focused on the subject at hand during task-oriented interactions. It consists of synthetic dialogues on a wide range of conversation topics from different domains. These dialogues are interspersed with distractor turns that intentionally divert the chatbot from the predefined topic. Fine-tuning language models on this dataset helps make them resilient to deviating from the role assigned and improves their ability to maintain topical coherence compared to general-purpose instruction-tuned LLMs like GPT-4-turbo and Mixtral-Instruct. Additionally, preliminary observations suggest that training models on this dataset also enhance their performance on fine-grained instruction following tasks, including safety alignment.

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Makesh Narsimhan Sreedhar, Traian Rebedea, Shaona Ghosh, Jiaqi Zeng, Christopher Parisien. 2024-06-21. CantTalkAboutThis: Aligning Language Models to Stay on Topic in Dialogues. https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.03820

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