Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Ghosal, Gaurav, Hashimoto, Tatsunori, Raghunathan, Aditi
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.14785
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866916296296235008
author Ghosal, Gaurav
Hashimoto, Tatsunori
Raghunathan, Aditi
author_facet Ghosal, Gaurav
Hashimoto, Tatsunori
Raghunathan, Aditi
contents In this work, we study the impact of QA fine-tuning data on downstream factuality. We show that fine-tuning on lesser-known facts that are poorly stored during pretraining yields significantly worse factuality than fine-tuning on well-known facts, even when all facts are seen during pretraining. We prove this phenomenon theoretically, showing that training on lesser-known facts can lead the model to ignore subject entity names and instead output a generic plausible response even when the relevant factual knowledge is encoded in the model. On three question answering benchmarks (PopQA, Entity Questions, and MMLU) and two language models (Llama-2-7B and Mistral-7B), we find that (i) finetuning on a completely factual but lesser-known subset of the data deteriorates downstream factuality (5-10%) and (ii) finetuning on a subset of better-known examples matches or outperforms finetuning on the entire dataset. Ultimately, our results shed light on the interaction between pretrained knowledge and finetuning data and demonstrate the importance of taking into account how facts are stored in the pretrained model when fine-tuning for knowledge-intensive tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_14785
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Understanding Finetuning for Factual Knowledge Extraction
Ghosal, Gaurav
Hashimoto, Tatsunori
Raghunathan, Aditi
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
In this work, we study the impact of QA fine-tuning data on downstream factuality. We show that fine-tuning on lesser-known facts that are poorly stored during pretraining yields significantly worse factuality than fine-tuning on well-known facts, even when all facts are seen during pretraining. We prove this phenomenon theoretically, showing that training on lesser-known facts can lead the model to ignore subject entity names and instead output a generic plausible response even when the relevant factual knowledge is encoded in the model. On three question answering benchmarks (PopQA, Entity Questions, and MMLU) and two language models (Llama-2-7B and Mistral-7B), we find that (i) finetuning on a completely factual but lesser-known subset of the data deteriorates downstream factuality (5-10%) and (ii) finetuning on a subset of better-known examples matches or outperforms finetuning on the entire dataset. Ultimately, our results shed light on the interaction between pretrained knowledge and finetuning data and demonstrate the importance of taking into account how facts are stored in the pretrained model when fine-tuning for knowledge-intensive tasks.
title Understanding Finetuning for Factual Knowledge Extraction
topic Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.14785