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 \textit{HoE}(Hierarchical Mixture-of-Experts), a \textit{lightweight}, \textit{parameter-efficient}, and \textit{plug-and-play} approach that eliminates the need for model training, while enabling LLMs to adapt across the entire Pareto frontier and accommodate diverse user preferences. In particular, \textit{HoE} consists of three hierarchical components: LoRA Experts, Router Experts and Preference Routing, reaching optimal Pareto frontiers and achieving a trade-off between parameter size, training cost, and performance. We evaluate \textit{HoE} across various tasks on 14 objectives and 200 different preferences among 6 benchmarks, demonstrating superior performance over 15 recent baselines. Code is available in the supplementary materials.