# NILE: Internal Consistency Alignment in Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.16686 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16686/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10560/) (2022)
- [Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04615/) (2022)
- [Challenging BIG-Bench Tasks and Whether Chain-of-Thought Can Solve Them](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09261/) (2022)
- [Know What You Don't Know: Unanswerable Questions for SQuAD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03822/) (2018)
- [Chatbot Arena: An Open Platform for Evaluating LLMs by Human Preference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04132/) (2024)
- [LIMA: Less Is More for Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11206/) (2023)
- [Length-Controlled AlpacaEval: A Simple Way to Debias Automatic Evaluators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04475/) (2024)
- [Super-NaturalInstructions: Generalization via Declarative Instructions on 1600+ NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07705/) (2022)
- [Enhancing Chat Language Models by Scaling High-quality Instructional Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14233/) (2023)
- [The Flan Collection: Designing Data and Methods for Effective Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13688/) (2023)
- [Self-Play Fine-Tuning Converts Weak Language Models to Strong Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01335/) (2024)
- [From Crowdsourced Data to High-Quality Benchmarks: Arena-Hard and BenchBuilder Pipeline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11939/) (2024)
- [Unnatural Instructions: Tuning Language Models with (Almost) No Human Labor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09689/) (2022)
- [Magpie: Alignment Data Synthesis from Scratch by Prompting Aligned LLMs with Nothing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08464/) (2024)
- [Principle-Driven Self-Alignment of Language Models from Scratch with Minimal Human Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03047/) (2023)
- [From Quantity to Quality: Boosting LLM Performance with Self-Guided Data Selection for Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12032/) (2023)
- [Self-Alignment with Instruction Backtranslation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06259/) (2023)
- [Unfamiliar Finetuning Examples Control How Language Models Hallucinate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05612/) (2024)
- [Cue-CoT: Chain-of-thought Prompting for Responding to In-depth Dialogue Questions with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11792/) (2023)
- [Instruction Mining: Instruction Data Selection for Tuning Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06290/) (2023)
- [Key-Point-Driven Data Synthesis with its Enhancement on Mathematical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02333/) (2024)
- [Selective Reflection-Tuning: Student-Selected Data Recycling for LLM Instruction-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10110/) (2024)
- [Learning or Self-aligning? Rethinking Instruction Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18243/) (2024)
- [Image Textualization: An Automatic Framework for Creating Accurate and Detailed Image Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07502/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Dense Retrieval with Relevance-Aware Contrastive Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03166/) (2023)
- [Enhancing Large Language Models Against Inductive Instructions with Dual-critique Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13733/) (2023)
- [CoachLM: Automatic Instruction Revisions Improve the Data Quality in LLM Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13246/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Self-Reasoning Language Models: Unfold Hidden Reasoning Chains with Few Reasoning Catalyst](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14116/) (2025)
- [Synthesizing Instruction-Tuning Datasets with Contrastive Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13538/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As a crucial step to enhance LLMs alignment with human intentions, Instruction Fine-Tuning (IFT) has a high demand on dataset quality. However, existing IFT datasets often contain knowledge that is inconsistent with LLMs' internal knowledge learned from the pre-training phase, which can greatly affect the efficacy of IFT. To address this issue, we introduce NILE (iNternal consIstency aLignmEnt) framework, aimed at optimizing IFT datasets to unlock LLMs' capability further. NILE operates by eliciting target pre-trained LLM's internal knowledge corresponding to instruction data. The internal knowledge is leveraged to revise the answer in IFT datasets. Additionally, we propose a novel Internal Consistency Filtering (ICF) method to filter training samples, ensuring its high consistency with LLM's internal knowledge. Our experiments demonstrate that NILE-aligned IFT datasets sharply boost LLM performance across multiple LLM ability evaluation datasets, achieving up to 66.6% gain on Arena-Hard and 68.5% on Alpaca-Eval V2. Further analysis confirms that each component of the NILE}framework contributes to these substantial performance improvements, and provides compelling evidence that dataset consistency with pre-trained internal knowledge is pivotal for maximizing LLM potential.