Concept-aware Data Construction Improves In-context Learning of Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Štefánik, Michal, Kadlčík, Marek, Sojka, Petr
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Štefánik, Michal
Kadlčík, Marek
Sojka, Petr
author_facet Štefánik, Michal
Kadlčík, Marek
Sojka, Petr
contents Many recent language models (LMs) are capable of in-context learning (ICL), manifested in the LMs' ability to perform a new task solely from natural-language instruction. Previous work curating in-context learners assumes that ICL emerges from a vast over-parametrization or the scale of multi-task training. However, recent theoretical work attributes the ICL ability to concept-dependent training data and creates functional in-context learners even in small-scale, synthetic settings. In this work, we practically explore this newly identified axis of ICL quality. We propose Concept-aware Training (CoAT), a framework for constructing training scenarios that make it beneficial for the LM to learn to utilize the analogical reasoning concepts from demonstrations. We find that by using CoAT, pre-trained transformers can learn to better utilise new latent concepts from demonstrations and that such ability makes ICL more robust to the functional deficiencies of the previous models. Finally, we show that concept-aware in-context learning is more effective for a majority of new tasks when compared to traditional instruction tuning, resulting in a performance comparable to the previous in-context learners using magnitudes of more training data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_09703
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Concept-aware Data Construction Improves In-context Learning of Language Models
Štefánik, Michal
Kadlčík, Marek
Sojka, Petr
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Many recent language models (LMs) are capable of in-context learning (ICL), manifested in the LMs' ability to perform a new task solely from natural-language instruction. Previous work curating in-context learners assumes that ICL emerges from a vast over-parametrization or the scale of multi-task training. However, recent theoretical work attributes the ICL ability to concept-dependent training data and creates functional in-context learners even in small-scale, synthetic settings. In this work, we practically explore this newly identified axis of ICL quality. We propose Concept-aware Training (CoAT), a framework for constructing training scenarios that make it beneficial for the LM to learn to utilize the analogical reasoning concepts from demonstrations. We find that by using CoAT, pre-trained transformers can learn to better utilise new latent concepts from demonstrations and that such ability makes ICL more robust to the functional deficiencies of the previous models. Finally, we show that concept-aware in-context learning is more effective for a majority of new tasks when compared to traditional instruction tuning, resulting in a performance comparable to the previous in-context learners using magnitudes of more training data.
title Concept-aware Data Construction Improves In-context Learning of Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.09703