Date
Publisher
arXiv
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in business-critical domains such as finance, education, healthcare, and customer support, where users expect consistent and reliable recommendations. Yet LLMs often exhibit variability when prompts are phrased with minor differences, even when semantically equivalent. Such inconsistency undermines trust, complicates compliance, and disrupts user experience. While personalization is desirable in certain contexts, many enterprise scenarios-such as HR onboarding, customer support, or policy disclosure-require invariant information delivery regardless of phrasing or prior conversational history. Existing approaches, including retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and temperature tuning, improve factuality or reduce stochasticity but cannot guarantee stability across equivalent prompts. In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning framework based on Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to directly optimize for consistency. Unlike prior applications of GRPO, which have been limited to reasoning and code generation, we adapt GRPO to enforce stability of information content across groups of semantically equivalent prompts. We introduce entropy-based helpfulness and stability rewards, treating prompt variants as groups and resetting conversational context to isolate phrasing effects. Experiments on investment and job recommendation tasks show that our GRPO-trained model reduces variability more effectively than fine-tuning or decoding-based baselines. To our knowledge, this is a novel application of GRPO for aligning LLMs toward information consistency, reframing variability not as an acceptable feature of generative diversity but as a correctable flaw in enterprise deployments.
Study at a glance
- Question: Can reinforcement learning train language models to give consistent recommendations across semantically equivalent prompt phrasings?
- Setting and data: Benchmark dataset of 870 paired male and female questions from online forums across jobs, education, investment, and health.
- Method: Reinforcement learning fine-tuning (Group Relative Policy Optimization) with custom helpfulness and consistency rewards, compared using two-tailed hypothesis testing.
Why it matters
Large language models often change their answers when identical prompts are rephrased with minor wording differences. This inconsistency undermines user trust, operational reliability, compliance, and fairness in high-stakes enterprise and educational settings.
Key findings
- Baseline models produced significantly different information content across male and female prompt variations, exhibiting notable inconsistency.
- Reinforcement learning fine-tuning reduced information differences between male and female prompts, narrowing category-level gaps in job and investment recommendations.
- Fine-tuning preserved response informativeness while aligning recommendations across equivalent prompt variants, without relying on external retrieval context.
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