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Megh Thakkar

Master's Research - Université de Montréal
Supervisor
Sarath Chandar
Research Topics
Natural Language Processing

Publications

Combining Domain and Alignment Vectors to Achieve Better Knowledge-Safety Trade-offs in LLMs
Megh Thakkar
Yash More
Quentin Fournier
Matthew D Riemer
Pin-Yu Chen
Amal Zouaq
Payel Das
Sarath Chandar
There is a growing interest in training domain-expert LLMs that excel in specific technical fields compared to their general-purpose instruc… (see more)tion-tuned counterparts. However, these expert models often experience a loss in their safety abilities in the process, making them capable of generating harmful content. As a solution, we introduce an efficient and effective merging-based alignment method called \textsc{MergeAlign} that interpolates the domain and alignment vectors, creating safer domain-specific models while preserving their utility. We apply \textsc{MergeAlign} on Llama3 variants that are experts in medicine and finance, obtaining substantial alignment improvements with minimal to no degradation on domain-specific benchmarks. We study the impact of model merging through model similarity metrics and contributions of individual models being merged. We hope our findings open new research avenues and inspire more efficient development of safe expert LLMs.
2024-11-11
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Combining Domain and Alignment Vectors to Achieve Better Knowledge-Safety Trade-offs in LLMs
Megh Thakkar
Yash More
Quentin Fournier
Matthew D Riemer
Pin-Yu Chen
Amal Zouaq
Payel Das
Sarath Chandar
There is a growing interest in training domain-expert LLMs that excel in specific technical fields compared to their general-purpose instruc… (see more)tion-tuned counterparts. However, these expert models often experience a loss in their safety abilities in the process, making them capable of generating harmful content. As a solution, we introduce an efficient and effective merging-based alignment method called \textsc{MergeAlign} that interpolates the domain and alignment vectors, creating safer domain-specific models while preserving their utility. We apply \textsc{MergeAlign} on Llama3 variants that are experts in medicine and finance, obtaining substantial alignment improvements with minimal to no degradation on domain-specific benchmarks. We study the impact of model merging through model similarity metrics and contributions of individual models being merged. We hope our findings open new research avenues and inspire more efficient development of safe expert LLMs.
2024-11-11
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Fine-Tuning Web Agents: It Works, But It's Trickier Than You Think
Massimo Caccia
Megh Thakkar
Léo Boisvert
Thibault Le Sellier De Chezelles
Alexandre Piché
Nicolas Chapados
Alexandre Drouin
Maxime Gasse
Alexandre Lacoste
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have sparked interest in developing autonomous web agents capable of performing digital … (see more)tasks through web interfaces in a human-like manner. However, even the strongest closed-source models often struggle to achieve robust results on several benchmarks, while a notable performance gap exists between them and open-source counterparts. This study investigates the potential of fine-tuning to enhance the performance of a smaller, lower-performing but cost-efficient LLM by leveraging successful traces from stronger LLMs, referred to as experts. We outline a comprehensive pipeline for data collection, filtering, and supervised fine-tuning and explore various behavior cloning parameters. Our experiments provide key insights into the challenges of fine-tuning LLMs into web agents on benchmarks like MiniWoB and WorkArena. Notably, we find that the fine-tuned agents' ability to predict expert trajectories does not consistently lead to improved downstream task performance. This raises issues such as off-policy bias and the loss of reasoning abilities during fine-tuning. We discuss potential solutions to these challenges and make both the codebase and a dataset of 140M tokens open-source for the community to build upon.
2024-10-22
NeurIPS.cc/2024/Workshop/OWA (poster)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Fine-Tuning Web Agents: It Works, But It's Trickier Than You Think
Massimo Caccia
Megh Thakkar
Léo Boisvert
Thibault Le Sellier De Chezelles
Alexandre Piché
Nicolas Chapados
Alexandre Drouin
Maxime Gasse
Alexandre Lacoste
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have sparked interest in developing autonomous web agents capable of performing digital … (see more)tasks through web interfaces in a human-like manner. However, even the strongest closed-source models often struggle to achieve robust results on several benchmarks, while a notable performance gap exists between them and open-source counterparts. This study investigates the potential of fine-tuning to enhance the performance of a smaller, lower-performing but cost-efficient LLM by leveraging successful traces from stronger LLMs, referred to as experts. We outline a comprehensive pipeline for data collection, filtering, and supervised fine-tuning and explore various behavior cloning parameters. Our experiments provide key insights into the challenges of fine-tuning LLMs into web agents on benchmarks like MiniWoB and WorkArena. Notably, we find that the fine-tuned agents' ability to predict expert trajectories does not consistently lead to improved downstream task performance. This raises issues such as off-policy bias and the loss of reasoning abilities during fine-tuning. We discuss potential solutions to these challenges and make both the codebase and a dataset of 140M tokens open-source for the community to build upon.
2024-10-22
NeurIPS.cc/2024/Workshop/OWA (poster)
openreview.net
openreview.net
AgentMerge: Enhancing Generalization in Fine-Tuned LLM Agents
Megh Thakkar
Léo Boisvert
Thibault Le Sellier De Chezelles
Alexandre Piché
Maxime Gasse
Alexandre Lacoste
Massimo Caccia
2024-10-10
NeurIPS.cc/2024/Workshop/AFM (poster)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Combining Domain and Alignment Vectors to Achieve Better Knowledge-Safety Trade-offs in LLMs
Megh Thakkar
Yash More
Quentin Fournier
Matthew D Riemer
Pin-Yu Chen
Amal Zouaq
Payel Das
Sarath Chandar
Chandar Research Lab
Mila - Québec
AI Institute
U. Montŕeal
Ibm Research
Polytechnique Montréal
There is a growing interest in training domain-expert LLMs that excel in specific technical fields compared to their general-purpose instruc… (see more)tion-tuned counterparts. However, these expert models often experience a loss in their safety abilities in the process, making them capable of generating harmful content. As a solution, we introduce an efficient and effective merging-based alignment method called \textsc{MergeAlign} that interpolates the domain and alignment vectors, creating safer domain-specific models while preserving their utility. We apply \textsc{MergeAlign} on Llama3 variants that are experts in medicine and finance, obtaining substantial alignment improvements with minimal to no degradation on domain-specific benchmarks. We study the impact of model merging through model similarity metrics and contributions of individual models being merged. We hope our findings open new research avenues and inspire more efficient development of safe expert LLMs.
2024-10-10
NeurIPS.cc/2024/Workshop/AFM (poster)
doi.org
openreview.net
WorkArena++: Towards Compositional Planning and Reasoning-based Common Knowledge Work Tasks
Léo Boisvert
Megh Thakkar
Maxime Gasse
Massimo Caccia
Thibault Le Sellier De Chezelles
Quentin Cappart
Nicolas Chapados
Alexandre Lacoste
Alexandre Drouin
The ability of large language models (LLMs) to mimic human-like intelligence has led to a surge in LLM-based autonomous agents. Though recen… (see more)t LLMs seem capable of planning and reasoning given user instructions, their effectiveness in applying these capabilities for autonomous task solving remains underexplored. This is especially true in enterprise settings, where automated agents hold the promise of a high impact. To fill this gap, we propose WorkArena++, a novel benchmark consisting of 682 tasks corresponding to realistic workflows routinely performed by knowledge workers. WorkArena++ is designed to evaluate the planning, problem-solving, logical/arithmetic reasoning, retrieval, and contextual understanding abilities of web agents. Our empirical studies across state-of-the-art LLMs and vision-language models (VLMs), as well as human workers, reveal several challenges for such models to serve as useful assistants in the workplace. In addition to the benchmark, we provide a mechanism to effortlessly generate thousands of ground-truth observation/action traces, which can be used for fine-tuning existing models. Overall, we expect this work to serve as a useful resource to help the community progress toward capable autonomous agents. The benchmark can be found at https://github.com/ServiceNow/WorkArena/tree/workarena-plus-plus.
2024-09-26
NeurIPS.cc/2024/Datasets_and_Benchmarks_Track (poster)
doi.org
openreview.net
WorkArena: How Capable are Web Agents at Solving Common Knowledge Work Tasks?
Alexandre Drouin
Maxime Gasse
Massimo Caccia
Issam Hadj Laradji
Manuel Del Verme
Tom Marty
Léo Boisvert
Megh Thakkar
Quentin Cappart
David Vazquez
Nicolas Chapados
Alexandre Lacoste
2024-07-08
Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning (published)
doi.org
openreview.net
A Deep Dive into the Trade-Offs of Parameter-Efficient Preference Alignment Techniques
Megh Thakkar
Quentin Fournier
Matthew D Riemer
Pin-Yu Chen
Amal Zouaq
Payel Das
Sarath Chandar
Large language models are first pre-trained on trillions of tokens and then instruction-tuned or aligned to specific preferences. While pre-… (see more)training remains out of reach for most researchers due to the compute required, fine-tuning has become affordable thanks to parameter-efficient methods such as LoRA and QLoRA. Alignment is known to be sensitive to the many factors involved, including the quantity and quality of data, the alignment method, and the adapter rank. However, there has not yet been an extensive study of their effect on downstream performance. To address this gap, we conduct an in-depth investigation of the impact of popular choices for three crucial axes: (i) the alignment dataset (HH-RLHF and BeaverTails), (ii) the alignment technique (SFT and DPO), and (iii) the model (LLaMA-1, Vicuna-v1.3, Mistral-7b, and Mistral-7b-Instruct). Our extensive setup spanning over 300 experiments reveals consistent trends and unexpected findings. We observe how more informative data helps with preference alignment, cases where supervised fine-tuning outperforms preference optimization, and how aligning to a distinct preference boosts performance on downstream tasks. Through our in-depth analyses, we put forward key guidelines to help researchers perform more effective parameter-efficient LLM alignment.
2024-06-07
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
A Deep Dive into the Trade-Offs of Parameter-Efficient Preference Alignment Techniques
Megh Thakkar
Quentin Fournier
Matthew D Riemer
Pin-Yu Chen
Amal Zouaq
Payel Das
Sarath Chandar
2024-06-07
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
A Deep Dive into the Trade-Offs of Parameter-Efficient Preference Alignment Techniques
Megh Thakkar
Quentin Fournier
Matthew D Riemer
Pin-Yu Chen
Amal Zouaq
Payel Das
Sarath Chandar
Large language models are first pre-trained on trillions of tokens and then instruction-tuned or aligned to specific preferences. While pre-… (see more)training remains out of reach for most researchers due to the compute required, fine-tuning has become affordable thanks to parameter-efficient methods such as LoRA and QLoRA. Alignment is known to be sensitive to the many factors involved, including the quantity and quality of data, the alignment method, and the adapter rank. However, there has not yet been an extensive study of their effect on downstream performance. To address this gap, we conduct an in-depth investigation of the impact of popular choices for three crucial axes: (i) the alignment dataset (HH-RLHF and BeaverTails), (ii) the alignment technique (SFT and DPO), and (iii) the model (LLaMA-1, Vicuna-v1.3, Mistral-7b, and Mistral-7b-Instruct). Our extensive setup spanning over 300 experiments reveals consistent trends and unexpected findings. We observe how more informative data helps with preference alignment, cases where supervised fine-tuning outperforms preference optimization, and how aligning to a distinct preference boosts performance on downstream tasks. Through our in-depth analyses, we put forward key guidelines to help researchers perform more effective parameter-efficient LLM alignment.
2024-06-07
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
WorkArena: How Capable Are Web Agents at Solving Common Knowledge Work Tasks?
Alexandre Drouin
Maxime Gasse
Massimo Caccia
Issam Hadj Laradji
Manuel Del Verme
Tom Marty
Léo Boisvert
Megh Thakkar
Quentin Cappart
David Vazquez
Nicolas Chapados
Alexandre Lacoste
We study the use of large language model-based agents for interacting with software via web browsers. Unlike prior work, we focus on measuri… (see more)ng the agents' ability to perform tasks that span the typical daily work of knowledge workers utilizing enterprise software systems. To this end, we propose WorkArena, a remote-hosted benchmark of 29 tasks based on the widely-used ServiceNow platform. We also introduce BrowserGym, an environment for the design and evaluation of such agents, offering a rich set of actions as well as multimodal observations. Our empirical evaluation reveals that while current agents show promise on WorkArena, there remains a considerable gap towards achieving full task automation. Notably, our analysis uncovers a significant performance disparity between open and closed-source LLMs, highlighting a critical area for future exploration and development in the field.
2024-03-12
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org