Teaching Models to Balance Resisting and Accepting Persuasion

TL;DR

This paper introduces Persuasion-Training (PBT), a method to train large language models to both resist negative persuasion and accept positive persuasion, improving their robustness and collaborative performance.

Contribution

The paper presents PBT, a novel training approach using multi-agent dialogue trees to balance resistance and acceptance of persuasion in large language models.

Findings

PBT improves resistance to misinformation and adversarial persuasion.

PBT enhances stability and teamwork in multi-agent debates.

Models trained with PBT outperform baseline models on holistic persuasion data.

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) are susceptible to persuasion, which can pose risks when models are faced with an adversarial interlocutor. We take a first step towards defending models against persuasion while also arguing that defense against adversarial (i.e. negative) persuasion is only half of the equation: models should also be able to accept beneficial (i.e. positive) persuasion to improve their answers. We show that optimizing models for only one side results in poor performance on the other. In order to balance positive and negative persuasion, we introduce Persuasion-Training (or PBT), which leverages multi-agent recursive dialogue trees to create data and trains models via preference optimization to accept persuasion when appropriate. PBT allows us to use data generated from dialogues between smaller 7-8B models for training much larger 70B models. Moreover, PBT consistently improves resistance to misinformation and resilience to being challenged while also resulting in the best overall performance on holistic data containing both positive and negative persuasion. Crucially, we show that PBT models are better teammates in multi-agent debates across two domains (trivia and commonsense QA). We find that without PBT, pairs of stronger and weaker models have unstable performance, with the order in which the models present their answers determining whether the team obtains the stronger or weaker model's performance. PBT leads to better and more stable results and less order dependence, with the stronger model consistently pulling the weaker one up.