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Main Authors: Zhao, Yingxiu, Yu, Bowen, Hui, Binyuan, Yu, Haiyang, Huang, Fei, Li, Yongbin, Zhang, Nevin L.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.05696
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author Zhao, Yingxiu
Yu, Bowen
Hui, Binyuan
Yu, Haiyang
Huang, Fei
Li, Yongbin
Zhang, Nevin L.
author_facet Zhao, Yingxiu
Yu, Bowen
Hui, Binyuan
Yu, Haiyang
Huang, Fei
Li, Yongbin
Zhang, Nevin L.
contents Training large language models (LLMs) with open-domain instruction data has yielded remarkable success in aligning to end tasks and human preferences. Extensive research has highlighted the importance of the quality and diversity of instruction data. However, the impact of data complexity, as a crucial metric, remains relatively unexplored from three aspects: (1)where the sustainability of performance improvements with increasing complexity is uncertain; (2)whether the improvement brought by complexity merely comes from introducing more training tokens; and (3)where the potential benefits of incorporating instructions from easy to difficult are not yet fully understood. In this paper, we propose Tree-Instruct to systematically enhance the instruction complexity in a controllable manner. By adding a specified number of nodes to instructions' semantic trees, this approach not only yields new instruction data from the modified tree but also allows us to control the difficulty level of modified instructions. Our preliminary experiments reveal the following insights: (1)Increasing complexity consistently leads to sustained performance improvements of LLMs. (2)Under the same token budget, a few complex instructions outperform diverse yet simple instructions. (3)Curriculum instruction tuning might not yield the anticipated results; focusing on increasing complexity appears to be the key.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2308_05696
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Preliminary Study of the Intrinsic Relationship between Complexity and Alignment
Zhao, Yingxiu
Yu, Bowen
Hui, Binyuan
Yu, Haiyang
Huang, Fei
Li, Yongbin
Zhang, Nevin L.
Computation and Language
Training large language models (LLMs) with open-domain instruction data has yielded remarkable success in aligning to end tasks and human preferences. Extensive research has highlighted the importance of the quality and diversity of instruction data. However, the impact of data complexity, as a crucial metric, remains relatively unexplored from three aspects: (1)where the sustainability of performance improvements with increasing complexity is uncertain; (2)whether the improvement brought by complexity merely comes from introducing more training tokens; and (3)where the potential benefits of incorporating instructions from easy to difficult are not yet fully understood. In this paper, we propose Tree-Instruct to systematically enhance the instruction complexity in a controllable manner. By adding a specified number of nodes to instructions' semantic trees, this approach not only yields new instruction data from the modified tree but also allows us to control the difficulty level of modified instructions. Our preliminary experiments reveal the following insights: (1)Increasing complexity consistently leads to sustained performance improvements of LLMs. (2)Under the same token budget, a few complex instructions outperform diverse yet simple instructions. (3)Curriculum instruction tuning might not yield the anticipated results; focusing on increasing complexity appears to be the key.
title A Preliminary Study of the Intrinsic Relationship between Complexity and Alignment
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.05696