Multi-objective Large Language Model Alignment with Hierarchical Experts

Abstract

Aligning large language models (LLMs) to simultaneously satisfy multiple objectives remains a significant challenge, especially given the diverse and often conflicting nature of human preferences. Existing alignment methods struggle to balance trade-offs effectively, often requiring costly retraining or yielding suboptimal results across the Pareto frontier of preferences. In this paper, we introduce HoE (Hierarchical Mixture-of-Experts), a lightweight, parameter-efficient, and plug-and-play approach that eliminates the need for model retraining, while enabling LLMs to adapt across the entire Pareto frontier and accommodate diverse user preferences. In particular, HoE consists of three hierarchical components: LoRA Experts, Router Experts and Weighting Router, reaching optimal Pareto frontiers and achieving a trade-off between parameter size, training cost, and performance. We evaluate HoE across various tasks on 16 objectives and 200 different preferences among 8 benchmarks, demonstrating superior performance over 15 recent baselines.