Chasing Random: Instruction Selection Strategies Fail to Generalize

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Diddee, Harshita, Ippolito, Daphne
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Diddee, Harshita
Ippolito, Daphne
author_facet Diddee, Harshita
Ippolito, Daphne
contents Prior work has shown that language models can be tuned to follow user instructions using only a small set of high-quality instructions. This has accelerated the development of methods that filter a large, noisy instruction-tuning datasets down to high-quality subset which works just as well. However, typically, the performance of these methods is not demonstrated across a uniform experimental setup and thus their generalization capabilities are not well established. In this work, we analyze popular selection strategies across different source datasets, selection budgets and evaluation benchmarks: Our results indicate that selection strategies generalize poorly, often failing to consistently outperform even random baselines. We also analyze the cost-performance trade-offs of using data selection. Our findings reveal that data selection can often exceed the cost of fine-tuning on the full dataset, yielding only marginal and sometimes no gains compared to tuning on the full dataset or a random subset.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_15225
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Chasing Random: Instruction Selection Strategies Fail to Generalize
Diddee, Harshita
Ippolito, Daphne
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Prior work has shown that language models can be tuned to follow user instructions using only a small set of high-quality instructions. This has accelerated the development of methods that filter a large, noisy instruction-tuning datasets down to high-quality subset which works just as well. However, typically, the performance of these methods is not demonstrated across a uniform experimental setup and thus their generalization capabilities are not well established. In this work, we analyze popular selection strategies across different source datasets, selection budgets and evaluation benchmarks: Our results indicate that selection strategies generalize poorly, often failing to consistently outperform even random baselines. We also analyze the cost-performance trade-offs of using data selection. Our findings reveal that data selection can often exceed the cost of fine-tuning on the full dataset, yielding only marginal and sometimes no gains compared to tuning on the full dataset or a random subset.
title Chasing Random: Instruction Selection Strategies Fail to Generalize
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.15225