Beyond Model Collapse: Scaling Up with Synthesized Data Requires Verification

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Feng, Yunzhen, Dohmatob, Elvis, Yang, Pu, Charton, Francois, Kempe, Julia
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Feng, Yunzhen
Dohmatob, Elvis
Yang, Pu
Charton, Francois
Kempe, Julia
author_facet Feng, Yunzhen
Dohmatob, Elvis
Yang, Pu
Charton, Francois
Kempe, Julia
contents Large Language Models (LLM) are increasingly trained on data generated by other LLM, either because generated text and images become part of the pre-training corpus, or because synthetized data is used as a replacement for expensive human-annotation. This raises concerns about \emph{model collapse}, a drop in model performance when their training sets include generated data. Considering that it is easier for both humans and machines to tell between good and bad examples than to generate high-quality samples, we investigate the use of verification on synthesized data to prevent model collapse. We provide a theoretical characterization using Gaussian mixtures, linear classifiers, and linear verifiers to derive conditions with measurable proxies to assess whether the verifier can effectively select synthesized data that leads to optimal performance. We experiment with two practical tasks -- computing matrix eigenvalues with transformers and news summarization with LLMs -- which both exhibit model collapse when trained on generated data, and show that verifiers, even imperfect ones, can indeed be harnessed to prevent model collapse and that our proposed proxy measure strongly correlates with performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_07515
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Beyond Model Collapse: Scaling Up with Synthesized Data Requires Verification
Feng, Yunzhen
Dohmatob, Elvis
Yang, Pu
Charton, Francois
Kempe, Julia
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Large Language Models (LLM) are increasingly trained on data generated by other LLM, either because generated text and images become part of the pre-training corpus, or because synthetized data is used as a replacement for expensive human-annotation. This raises concerns about \emph{model collapse}, a drop in model performance when their training sets include generated data. Considering that it is easier for both humans and machines to tell between good and bad examples than to generate high-quality samples, we investigate the use of verification on synthesized data to prevent model collapse. We provide a theoretical characterization using Gaussian mixtures, linear classifiers, and linear verifiers to derive conditions with measurable proxies to assess whether the verifier can effectively select synthesized data that leads to optimal performance. We experiment with two practical tasks -- computing matrix eigenvalues with transformers and news summarization with LLMs -- which both exhibit model collapse when trained on generated data, and show that verifiers, even imperfect ones, can indeed be harnessed to prevent model collapse and that our proposed proxy measure strongly correlates with performance.
title Beyond Model Collapse: Scaling Up with Synthesized Data Requires Verification
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.07515