Long Is More for Alignment: A Simple but Tough-to-Beat Baseline for Instruction Fine-Tuning
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2024
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| _version_ | 1866914822578241536 |
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| author | Zhao, Hao Andriushchenko, Maksym Croce, Francesco Flammarion, Nicolas |
| author_facet | Zhao, Hao Andriushchenko, Maksym Croce, Francesco Flammarion, Nicolas |
| contents | There is a consensus that instruction fine-tuning of LLMs requires high-quality data, but what are they? LIMA (NeurIPS 2023) and AlpaGasus (ICLR 2024) are state-of-the-art methods for selecting such high-quality examples, either via manual curation or using GPT-3.5-Turbo as a quality scorer. We show that the extremely simple baseline of selecting the 1,000 instructions with longest responses -- that intuitively contain more learnable information and are harder to overfit -- from standard datasets can consistently outperform these sophisticated methods according to GPT-4 and PaLM-2 as judges, while remaining competitive on the Open LLM benchmarks that test factual knowledge. We demonstrate this for several LLMs (Llama-2-7B, Llama-2-13B, Mistral-7B-v0.1) and datasets (Alpaca-52k, Evol-Instruct-70k). In addition, a lightweight refinement of such long instructions can further improve the abilities of the fine-tuned LLMs, and allows us to obtain competitive results on MT-Bench and the 2nd highest-ranked Llama-2-7B-based model on AlpacaEval 2.0, while training on only 1,000 examples and no extra preference data. We also conduct a thorough analysis of our models to ensure that their enhanced performance is not simply due to GPT-4's preference for longer responses. Overall, our findings suggest that fine-tuning on the longest responses should be the default baseline for any work on instruction fine-tuning. We provide our code at https://github.com/tml-epfl/long-is-more-for-alignment. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_04833 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2024 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Long Is More for Alignment: A Simple but Tough-to-Beat Baseline for Instruction Fine-Tuning Zhao, Hao Andriushchenko, Maksym Croce, Francesco Flammarion, Nicolas Computation and Language There is a consensus that instruction fine-tuning of LLMs requires high-quality data, but what are they? LIMA (NeurIPS 2023) and AlpaGasus (ICLR 2024) are state-of-the-art methods for selecting such high-quality examples, either via manual curation or using GPT-3.5-Turbo as a quality scorer. We show that the extremely simple baseline of selecting the 1,000 instructions with longest responses -- that intuitively contain more learnable information and are harder to overfit -- from standard datasets can consistently outperform these sophisticated methods according to GPT-4 and PaLM-2 as judges, while remaining competitive on the Open LLM benchmarks that test factual knowledge. We demonstrate this for several LLMs (Llama-2-7B, Llama-2-13B, Mistral-7B-v0.1) and datasets (Alpaca-52k, Evol-Instruct-70k). In addition, a lightweight refinement of such long instructions can further improve the abilities of the fine-tuned LLMs, and allows us to obtain competitive results on MT-Bench and the 2nd highest-ranked Llama-2-7B-based model on AlpacaEval 2.0, while training on only 1,000 examples and no extra preference data. We also conduct a thorough analysis of our models to ensure that their enhanced performance is not simply due to GPT-4's preference for longer responses. Overall, our findings suggest that fine-tuning on the longest responses should be the default baseline for any work on instruction fine-tuning. We provide our code at https://github.com/tml-epfl/long-is-more-for-alignment. |
| title | Long Is More for Alignment: A Simple but Tough-to-Beat Baseline for Instruction Fine-Tuning |
| topic | Computation and Language |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.04833 |