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Main Authors: Liang, Shihao, Tian, Runchu, Zhu, Kunlun, Qin, Yujia, Wang, Huadong, Cong, Xin, Liu, Zhiyuan, Liu, Xiaojiang, Sun, Maosong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.15504
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author Liang, Shihao
Tian, Runchu
Zhu, Kunlun
Qin, Yujia
Wang, Huadong
Cong, Xin
Liu, Zhiyuan
Liu, Xiaojiang
Sun, Maosong
author_facet Liang, Shihao
Tian, Runchu
Zhu, Kunlun
Qin, Yujia
Wang, Huadong
Cong, Xin
Liu, Zhiyuan
Liu, Xiaojiang
Sun, Maosong
contents Instruction tuning has emerged as a promising approach to enhancing large language models in following human instructions. It is shown that increasing the diversity and number of instructions in the training data can consistently enhance generalization performance, which facilitates a recent endeavor to collect various instructions and integrate existing instruction tuning datasets into larger collections. However, different users have their unique ways of expressing instructions, and there often exist variations across different datasets in the instruction styles and formats, i.e., format inconsistency. In this work, we propose a framework named Unified Instruction Tuning (UIT), which calls OpenAI APIs for automatic format transfer among different instruction tuning datasets such as PromptSource, FLAN and CrossFit. With the framework, we (1) demonstrate the necessity of maintaining format consistency in instruction tuning; (2) improve the generalization performance on unseen instructions on T5-LM-xl; (3) provide a novel perplexity-based denoising method to reduce the noise of automatic format transfer to make the UIT framework more practical and a smaller offline model based on GPT-J that achieves comparable format transfer capability to OpenAI APIs to reduce costs in practice. Further analysis regarding variations of targeted formats and other effects is intended.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2307_15504
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Exploring Format Consistency for Instruction Tuning
Liang, Shihao
Tian, Runchu
Zhu, Kunlun
Qin, Yujia
Wang, Huadong
Cong, Xin
Liu, Zhiyuan
Liu, Xiaojiang
Sun, Maosong
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Instruction tuning has emerged as a promising approach to enhancing large language models in following human instructions. It is shown that increasing the diversity and number of instructions in the training data can consistently enhance generalization performance, which facilitates a recent endeavor to collect various instructions and integrate existing instruction tuning datasets into larger collections. However, different users have their unique ways of expressing instructions, and there often exist variations across different datasets in the instruction styles and formats, i.e., format inconsistency. In this work, we propose a framework named Unified Instruction Tuning (UIT), which calls OpenAI APIs for automatic format transfer among different instruction tuning datasets such as PromptSource, FLAN and CrossFit. With the framework, we (1) demonstrate the necessity of maintaining format consistency in instruction tuning; (2) improve the generalization performance on unseen instructions on T5-LM-xl; (3) provide a novel perplexity-based denoising method to reduce the noise of automatic format transfer to make the UIT framework more practical and a smaller offline model based on GPT-J that achieves comparable format transfer capability to OpenAI APIs to reduce costs in practice. Further analysis regarding variations of targeted formats and other effects is intended.
title Exploring Format Consistency for Instruction Tuning
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.15504