SoftSRV: Learn to Generate Targeted Synthetic Data

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: DeSalvo, Giulia, Kagy, Jean-Fracois, Karydas, Lazaros, Rostamizadeh, Afshin, Kumar, Sanjiv
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author DeSalvo, Giulia
Kagy, Jean-Fracois
Karydas, Lazaros
Rostamizadeh, Afshin
Kumar, Sanjiv
author_facet DeSalvo, Giulia
Kagy, Jean-Fracois
Karydas, Lazaros
Rostamizadeh, Afshin
Kumar, Sanjiv
contents We present a novel framework, SoftSRV, that is used to generate targeted synthetic fine-tuning data for improving task-specific model performance. Given a sample from a target distribution, our proposed framework uses a data-driven loss minimization approach to steer a frozen large language model (LLM) to generate synthetic sequences that are similar to those from the target distribution. SoftSRV provides a practical improvement over common prompt engineering approaches that rely on human-engineered prompt-templates, which can be idiosyncratic, labor-intensive to craft, and may need to be specialized per domain. We empirically evaluate our method against standard baselines guiding a large LLM to generate synthetic data to fine-tune a smaller language model on three different domains (coding, math, reasoning). We perform these evaluations without any particular specialization of the framework to each domain, emphasizing the generality of our approach. We find that SoftSRV improves upon typical prompt engineering approaches, generating targeted data that leads to fine-tuned models with significantly better task-specific performance. In addition, SoftSRV-generated data better matches the target distribution according to the MAUVE similarity metric.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_16534
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SoftSRV: Learn to Generate Targeted Synthetic Data
DeSalvo, Giulia
Kagy, Jean-Fracois
Karydas, Lazaros
Rostamizadeh, Afshin
Kumar, Sanjiv
Machine Learning
We present a novel framework, SoftSRV, that is used to generate targeted synthetic fine-tuning data for improving task-specific model performance. Given a sample from a target distribution, our proposed framework uses a data-driven loss minimization approach to steer a frozen large language model (LLM) to generate synthetic sequences that are similar to those from the target distribution. SoftSRV provides a practical improvement over common prompt engineering approaches that rely on human-engineered prompt-templates, which can be idiosyncratic, labor-intensive to craft, and may need to be specialized per domain. We empirically evaluate our method against standard baselines guiding a large LLM to generate synthetic data to fine-tune a smaller language model on three different domains (coding, math, reasoning). We perform these evaluations without any particular specialization of the framework to each domain, emphasizing the generality of our approach. We find that SoftSRV improves upon typical prompt engineering approaches, generating targeted data that leads to fine-tuned models with significantly better task-specific performance. In addition, SoftSRV-generated data better matches the target distribution according to the MAUVE similarity metric.
title SoftSRV: Learn to Generate Targeted Synthetic Data
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.16534