Recent advancements in instruction-tuning datasets have predominantly focused on specific tasks like mathematical or logical reasoning. There has been a notable gap in data designed for aligning language models to maintain topic relevance in conversations - a critical aspect for deploying chatbots to production. We introduce the CantTalkAboutThis dataset to help language models remain focused on the subject at hand during task-oriented interactions. It consists of synthetic dialogues on a wide range of conversation topics from different domains. These dialogues are interspersed with distractor turns that intentionally divert the chatbot from the predefined topic. Fine-tuning language models on this dataset helps make them resilient to deviating from the role assigned and improves their ability to maintain topical coherence compared to general-purpose instruction-tuned LLMs like GPT-4-turbo and Mixtral-Instruct. Additionally, preliminary observations suggest that training models on this dataset also enhance their performance on fine-grained instruction following tasks, including safety alignment.
@article{arxiv.2404.03820,
title = {CantTalkAboutThis: Aligning Language Models to Stay on Topic in Dialogues},
author = {Makesh Narsimhan Sreedhar and Traian Rebedea and Shaona Ghosh and Jiaqi Zeng and Christopher Parisien},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.03820},
year = {2024}
}