Evaluating Language Models as Synthetic Data Generators

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Kim, Seungone, Suk, Juyoung, Yue, Xiang, Viswanathan, Vijay, Lee, Seongyun, Wang, Yizhong, Gashteovski, Kiril, Lawrence, Carolin, Welleck, Sean, Neubig, Graham
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Kim, Seungone
Suk, Juyoung
Yue, Xiang
Viswanathan, Vijay
Lee, Seongyun
Wang, Yizhong
Gashteovski, Kiril
Lawrence, Carolin
Welleck, Sean
Neubig, Graham
author_facet Kim, Seungone
Suk, Juyoung
Yue, Xiang
Viswanathan, Vijay
Lee, Seongyun
Wang, Yizhong
Gashteovski, Kiril
Lawrence, Carolin
Welleck, Sean
Neubig, Graham
contents Given the increasing use of synthetic data in language model (LM) post-training, an LM's ability to generate high-quality data has become nearly as crucial as its ability to solve problems directly. While prior works have focused on developing effective data generation methods, they lack systematic comparison of different LMs as data generators in a unified setting. To address this gap, we propose AgoraBench, a benchmark that provides standardized settings and metrics to evaluate LMs' data generation abilities. Through synthesizing 1.26 million training instances using 6 LMs and training 99 student models, we uncover key insights about LMs' data generation capabilities. First, we observe that LMs exhibit distinct strengths. For instance, GPT-4o excels at generating new problems, while Claude-3.5-Sonnet performs better at enhancing existing ones. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that an LM's data generation ability doesn't necessarily correlate with its problem-solving ability. Instead, multiple intrinsic features of data quality-including response quality, perplexity, and instruction difficulty-collectively serve as better indicators. Finally, we demonstrate that strategic choices in output format and cost-conscious model selection significantly impact data generation effectiveness.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_03679
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Evaluating Language Models as Synthetic Data Generators
Kim, Seungone
Suk, Juyoung
Yue, Xiang
Viswanathan, Vijay
Lee, Seongyun
Wang, Yizhong
Gashteovski, Kiril
Lawrence, Carolin
Welleck, Sean
Neubig, Graham
Computation and Language
Given the increasing use of synthetic data in language model (LM) post-training, an LM's ability to generate high-quality data has become nearly as crucial as its ability to solve problems directly. While prior works have focused on developing effective data generation methods, they lack systematic comparison of different LMs as data generators in a unified setting. To address this gap, we propose AgoraBench, a benchmark that provides standardized settings and metrics to evaluate LMs' data generation abilities. Through synthesizing 1.26 million training instances using 6 LMs and training 99 student models, we uncover key insights about LMs' data generation capabilities. First, we observe that LMs exhibit distinct strengths. For instance, GPT-4o excels at generating new problems, while Claude-3.5-Sonnet performs better at enhancing existing ones. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that an LM's data generation ability doesn't necessarily correlate with its problem-solving ability. Instead, multiple intrinsic features of data quality-including response quality, perplexity, and instruction difficulty-collectively serve as better indicators. Finally, we demonstrate that strategic choices in output format and cost-conscious model selection significantly impact data generation effectiveness.
title Evaluating Language Models as Synthetic Data Generators
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.03679