SMART: Submodular Data Mixture Strategy for Instruction Tuning

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Main Authors: Renduchintala, H S V N S Kowndinya, Bhatia, Sumit, Ramakrishnan, Ganesh
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Renduchintala, H S V N S Kowndinya
Bhatia, Sumit
Ramakrishnan, Ganesh
author_facet Renduchintala, H S V N S Kowndinya
Bhatia, Sumit
Ramakrishnan, Ganesh
contents Instruction Tuning involves finetuning a language model on a collection of instruction-formatted datasets in order to enhance the generalizability of the model to unseen tasks. Studies have shown the importance of balancing different task proportions during finetuning, but finding the right balance remains challenging. Unfortunately, there's currently no systematic method beyond manual tuning or relying on practitioners' intuition. In this paper, we introduce SMART (Submodular data Mixture strAtegy for instRuction Tuning) - a novel data mixture strategy which makes use of a submodular function to assign importance scores to tasks which are then used to determine the mixture weights. Given a fine-tuning budget, SMART redistributes the budget among tasks and selects non-redundant samples from each task. Experimental results demonstrate that SMART significantly outperforms traditional methods such as examples proportional mixing and equal mixing. Furthermore, SMART facilitates the creation of data mixtures based on a few representative subsets of tasks alone and through task pruning analysis, we reveal that in a limited budget setting, allocating budget among a subset of representative tasks yields superior performance compared to distributing the budget among all tasks. The code for reproducing our results is open-sourced at https://github.com/kowndinya-renduchintala/SMART.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_08370
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SMART: Submodular Data Mixture Strategy for Instruction Tuning
Renduchintala, H S V N S Kowndinya
Bhatia, Sumit
Ramakrishnan, Ganesh
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Instruction Tuning involves finetuning a language model on a collection of instruction-formatted datasets in order to enhance the generalizability of the model to unseen tasks. Studies have shown the importance of balancing different task proportions during finetuning, but finding the right balance remains challenging. Unfortunately, there's currently no systematic method beyond manual tuning or relying on practitioners' intuition. In this paper, we introduce SMART (Submodular data Mixture strAtegy for instRuction Tuning) - a novel data mixture strategy which makes use of a submodular function to assign importance scores to tasks which are then used to determine the mixture weights. Given a fine-tuning budget, SMART redistributes the budget among tasks and selects non-redundant samples from each task. Experimental results demonstrate that SMART significantly outperforms traditional methods such as examples proportional mixing and equal mixing. Furthermore, SMART facilitates the creation of data mixtures based on a few representative subsets of tasks alone and through task pruning analysis, we reveal that in a limited budget setting, allocating budget among a subset of representative tasks yields superior performance compared to distributing the budget among all tasks. The code for reproducing our results is open-sourced at https://github.com/kowndinya-renduchintala/SMART.
title SMART: Submodular Data Mixture Strategy for Instruction Tuning
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.08370