Synthesizing Post-Training Data for LLMs through Multi-Agent Simulation

Post-training is essential for enabling large language models (LLMs) to follow human instructions. Inspired by the recent success of using LLMs to simulate human society, we leverage multi-agent simulation to automatically generate diverse text-based scenarios, capturing a wide range of real-world human needs. We propose MATRIX, a multi-agent simulator that creates realistic and scalable scenarios. Leveraging these outputs, we introduce a novel scenario-driven instruction generator MATRIX-Gen for controllable and highly realistic data synthesis. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework effectively generates both general and domain-specific data. Notably, on AlpacaEval 2 and Arena-Hard benchmarks, Llama-3-8B-Base, post-trained on datasets synthesized by MATRIX-Gen with just 20K instruction-response pairs, outperforms Meta's Llama-3-8B-Instruct model, which was trained on over 10M pairs; see our project at https://github.com/ShuoTang123/MATRIX-Gen.

Self-Alignment of Large Language Models via Monopolylogue-based Social Scene Simulation

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values is imperative to mitigate potential adverse effects resulting from their misuse. Drawing from the sociological insight that acknowledging all parties' concerns is a key factor in shaping human values, this paper proposes a novel direction to align LLMs by themselves: social scene simulation. To achieve this, we present MATRIX, a novel social scene simulator that emulates realistic scenes around a user's input query, enabling the LLM to take social consequences into account before responding. MATRIX serves as a virtual rehearsal space, akin to a Monopolylogue, where the LLM performs diverse roles related to the query and practice by itself. To inject this alignment, we fine-tune the LLM with MATRIX-simulated data, ensuring adherence to human values without compromising inference speed. We theoretically show that the LLM with MATRIX outperforms Constitutional AI under mild assumptions. Finally, extensive experiments validate that our method outperforms over 10 baselines across 4 benchmarks. As evidenced by 875 user ratings, our tuned 13B-size LLM exceeds GPT-4 in aligning with human values. Code is available at https://github.com/pangxianghe/MATRIX.

Pragmatic Communication in Multi-Agent Collaborative Perception

Collaborative perception allows each agent to enhance its perceptual abilities by exchanging messages with others. It inherently results in a trade-off between perception ability and communication costs. Previous works transmit complete full-frame high-dimensional feature maps among agents, resulting in substantial communication costs. To promote communication efficiency, we propose only transmitting the information needed for the collaborator's downstream task. This pragmatic communication strategy focuses on three key aspects: i) pragmatic message selection, which selects task-critical parts from the complete data, resulting in spatially and temporally sparse feature vectors; ii) pragmatic message representation, which achieves pragmatic approximation of high-dimensional feature vectors with a task-adaptive dictionary, enabling communicating with integer indices; iii) pragmatic collaborator selection, which identifies beneficial collaborators, pruning unnecessary communication links. Following this strategy, we first formulate a mathematical optimization framework for the perception-communication trade-off and then propose PragComm, a multi-agent collaborative perception system with two key components: i) single-agent detection and tracking and ii) pragmatic collaboration. The proposed PragComm promotes pragmatic communication and adapts to a wide range of communication conditions. We evaluate PragComm for both collaborative 3D object detection and tracking tasks in both real-world, V2V4Real, and simulation datasets, OPV2V and V2X-SIM2.0. PragComm consistently outperforms previous methods with more than 32.7K times lower communication volume on OPV2V. Code is available at github.com/PhyllisH/PragComm.