Non-instructional Fine-tuning: Enabling Instruction-Following Capabilities in Pre-trained Language Models without Instruction-Following Data

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Auteurs principaux: Xie, Juncheng, Syu, Shensian, Lee, Hung-yi
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Xie, Juncheng
Syu, Shensian
Lee, Hung-yi
author_facet Xie, Juncheng
Syu, Shensian
Lee, Hung-yi
contents Instruction fine-tuning is crucial for today's large language models (LLMs) to learn to follow instructions and align with human preferences. Conventionally, supervised data, including the instruction and the correct response, is required for instruction fine-tuning. To obtain such data, some researchers prompted well-trained models like GPT-4 to generate instructions and correct responses. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that uses the first half of a random text from OpenWebText as the instruction and GPT-3.5-turbo or GPT-4-turbo to complete the text as the response. Despite the data being "non-instructional", we found that pre-trained LLMs fine-tuned on this data can gain instruction-following capabilities. This observation is verified by fine-tuning several well-known pre-trained LLMs (e.g., LLaMA-2-7B, LLaMA-3-8B, LLaMA-3-70B, Mistral-7B-v0.1). The "non-instructional data" also improved some models that underwent supervised fine-tuning and human preference alignment. Our LLaMA-3-70B-Instruct fine-tuned through "non-instructional data" is comparable with LLaMA-3.1-70B-Instruct on the Arena Hard leaderboard. We analyzed the "non-instructional data" and ensured it is devoid of content related to instruction fine-tuning. Our findings will inspire further investigation into how to develop instruction-following capabilities without explicit instruction-related data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_00096
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Non-instructional Fine-tuning: Enabling Instruction-Following Capabilities in Pre-trained Language Models without Instruction-Following Data
Xie, Juncheng
Syu, Shensian
Lee, Hung-yi
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Instruction fine-tuning is crucial for today's large language models (LLMs) to learn to follow instructions and align with human preferences. Conventionally, supervised data, including the instruction and the correct response, is required for instruction fine-tuning. To obtain such data, some researchers prompted well-trained models like GPT-4 to generate instructions and correct responses. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that uses the first half of a random text from OpenWebText as the instruction and GPT-3.5-turbo or GPT-4-turbo to complete the text as the response. Despite the data being "non-instructional", we found that pre-trained LLMs fine-tuned on this data can gain instruction-following capabilities. This observation is verified by fine-tuning several well-known pre-trained LLMs (e.g., LLaMA-2-7B, LLaMA-3-8B, LLaMA-3-70B, Mistral-7B-v0.1). The "non-instructional data" also improved some models that underwent supervised fine-tuning and human preference alignment. Our LLaMA-3-70B-Instruct fine-tuned through "non-instructional data" is comparable with LLaMA-3.1-70B-Instruct on the Arena Hard leaderboard. We analyzed the "non-instructional data" and ensured it is devoid of content related to instruction fine-tuning. Our findings will inspire further investigation into how to develop instruction-following capabilities without explicit instruction-related data.
title Non-instructional Fine-tuning: Enabling Instruction-Following Capabilities in Pre-trained Language Models without Instruction-Following Data
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.00096