The Right Time Matters: Data Arrangement Affects Zero-Shot Generalization in Instruction Tuning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: He, Bingxiang, Ding, Ning, Qian, Cheng, Deng, Jia, Cui, Ganqu, Yuan, Lifan, Hong, Haiwen, Gao, Huan-ang, Huang, Longtao, Xue, Hui, Chen, Huimin, Liu, Zhiyuan, Sun, Maosong
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author He, Bingxiang
Ding, Ning
Qian, Cheng
Deng, Jia
Cui, Ganqu
Yuan, Lifan
Hong, Haiwen
Gao, Huan-ang
Huang, Longtao
Xue, Hui
Chen, Huimin
Liu, Zhiyuan
Sun, Maosong
author_facet He, Bingxiang
Ding, Ning
Qian, Cheng
Deng, Jia
Cui, Ganqu
Yuan, Lifan
Hong, Haiwen
Gao, Huan-ang
Huang, Longtao
Xue, Hui
Chen, Huimin
Liu, Zhiyuan
Sun, Maosong
contents Understanding alignment techniques begins with comprehending zero-shot generalization brought by instruction tuning, but little of the mechanism has been understood. Existing work has largely been confined to the task level, without considering that tasks are artificially defined and, to LLMs, merely consist of tokens and representations. To bridge this gap, we investigate zero-shot generalization from the perspective of the data itself. We first demonstrate that zero-shot generalization happens very early during instruction tuning, with loss serving as a stable indicator. Next, we investigate training data arrangement through similarity and granularity perspectives, confirming that the timing of exposure to certain training examples may greatly facilitate generalization on unseen tasks. Finally, we propose a more grounded training data arrangement framework, Test-centric Multi-turn Arrangement, and show its effectiveness in promoting continual learning and further loss reduction. For the first time, we show that zero-shot generalization during instruction tuning is a form of similarity-based generalization between training and test data at the instance level. Our code is released at https://github.com/thunlp/Dynamics-of-Zero-Shot-Generalization.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_11721
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Right Time Matters: Data Arrangement Affects Zero-Shot Generalization in Instruction Tuning
He, Bingxiang
Ding, Ning
Qian, Cheng
Deng, Jia
Cui, Ganqu
Yuan, Lifan
Hong, Haiwen
Gao, Huan-ang
Huang, Longtao
Xue, Hui
Chen, Huimin
Liu, Zhiyuan
Sun, Maosong
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Understanding alignment techniques begins with comprehending zero-shot generalization brought by instruction tuning, but little of the mechanism has been understood. Existing work has largely been confined to the task level, without considering that tasks are artificially defined and, to LLMs, merely consist of tokens and representations. To bridge this gap, we investigate zero-shot generalization from the perspective of the data itself. We first demonstrate that zero-shot generalization happens very early during instruction tuning, with loss serving as a stable indicator. Next, we investigate training data arrangement through similarity and granularity perspectives, confirming that the timing of exposure to certain training examples may greatly facilitate generalization on unseen tasks. Finally, we propose a more grounded training data arrangement framework, Test-centric Multi-turn Arrangement, and show its effectiveness in promoting continual learning and further loss reduction. For the first time, we show that zero-shot generalization during instruction tuning is a form of similarity-based generalization between training and test data at the instance level. Our code is released at https://github.com/thunlp/Dynamics-of-Zero-Shot-Generalization.
title The Right Time Matters: Data Arrangement Affects Zero-Shot Generalization in Instruction Tuning
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.11721