Adapting Large Language Models to Domains via Reading Comprehension

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Cheng, Daixuan, Huang, Shaohan, Wei, Furu
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2023
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author Cheng, Daixuan
Huang, Shaohan
Wei, Furu
author_facet Cheng, Daixuan
Huang, Shaohan
Wei, Furu
contents We explore how continued pre-training on domain-specific corpora influences large language models, revealing that training on the raw corpora endows the model with domain knowledge, but drastically hurts its prompting ability for question answering. Taken inspiration from human learning via reading comprehension--practice after reading improves the ability to answer questions based on the learned knowledge--we propose a simple method for transforming raw corpora into reading comprehension texts. Each raw text is enriched with a series of tasks related to its content. Our method, highly scalable and applicable to any pre-training corpora, consistently enhances performance across various tasks in three different domains: biomedicine, finance, and law. Notably, our 7B language model achieves competitive performance with domain-specific models of much larger scales, such as BloombergGPT-50B. Furthermore, we demonstrate that domain-specific reading comprehension texts can improve the model's performance even on general benchmarks, showing the potential to develop a general model across even more domains. Our model, code, and data are available at https://github.com/microsoft/LMOps.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2309_09530
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Adapting Large Language Models to Domains via Reading Comprehension
Cheng, Daixuan
Huang, Shaohan
Wei, Furu
Computation and Language
We explore how continued pre-training on domain-specific corpora influences large language models, revealing that training on the raw corpora endows the model with domain knowledge, but drastically hurts its prompting ability for question answering. Taken inspiration from human learning via reading comprehension--practice after reading improves the ability to answer questions based on the learned knowledge--we propose a simple method for transforming raw corpora into reading comprehension texts. Each raw text is enriched with a series of tasks related to its content. Our method, highly scalable and applicable to any pre-training corpora, consistently enhances performance across various tasks in three different domains: biomedicine, finance, and law. Notably, our 7B language model achieves competitive performance with domain-specific models of much larger scales, such as BloombergGPT-50B. Furthermore, we demonstrate that domain-specific reading comprehension texts can improve the model's performance even on general benchmarks, showing the potential to develop a general model across even more domains. Our model, code, and data are available at https://github.com/microsoft/LMOps.
title Adapting Large Language Models to Domains via Reading Comprehension
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.09530