Mix Data or Merge Models? Balancing the Helpfulness, Honesty, and Harmlessness of Large Language Model via Model Merging

Achieving balanced alignment of large language models (LLMs) in terms of Helpfulness, Honesty, and Harmlessness (3H optimization) constitutes a cornerstone of responsible AI. Existing methods like data mixture strategies face limitations, including heavy reliance on expert knowledge and conflicting optimization signals. While model merging offers parameter-level conflict-resolution strategies through integrating specialized models’ parameters, its potential for 3H optimization remains underexplored. This paper systematically compares the effectiveness of model merging and data mixture methods in constructing 3H-aligned LLMs for the first time, revealing previously overlooked collaborative and conflict relationships among the 3H dimensions and discussing the advantages and drawbacks of data mixture ($\mathit{\text{data-level}}$) and model merging ($\mathit{\text{parameter-level}}$) methods in mitigating the conflict for balanced 3H optimization. Specially, we propose a novel $\mathbf{\text{R}}$eweighting $\mathbf{\text{E}}$nhanced task $\mathbf{\text{S}}$ingular $\mathbf{\text{M}}$erging method, $\mathbf{\text{RESM}}$, through outlier weighting and sparsity-aware rank selection strategies to address the challenges of preference noise accumulation and layer sparsity adaptation inherent in 3H-aligned LLM merging. Extensive evaluations can verify the effectiveness and robustness of RESM compared to previous data mixture (2%-5% gain) and model merging (1%-3% gain) methods in achieving balanced LLM alignment. We release our models through \href{https://huggingface.co/Jinluan}{3H_Merging} for further investigations.