TCIA: A Task-Centric Instruction Augmentation Method for Instruction Finetuning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ma, Simin, Liu, Shujian, Tan, Jun, Hu, Yebowen, Wang, Song, Indurthi, Sathish Reddy, Zhao, Sanqiang, Wu, Liwei, Han, Jianbing, Song, Kaiqiang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Ma, Simin
Liu, Shujian
Tan, Jun
Hu, Yebowen
Wang, Song
Indurthi, Sathish Reddy
Zhao, Sanqiang
Wu, Liwei
Han, Jianbing
Song, Kaiqiang
author_facet Ma, Simin
Liu, Shujian
Tan, Jun
Hu, Yebowen
Wang, Song
Indurthi, Sathish Reddy
Zhao, Sanqiang
Wu, Liwei
Han, Jianbing
Song, Kaiqiang
contents Diverse instruction data is vital for effective instruction tuning of large language models, as it enables the model to generalize across different types of inputs . Building such diversified instruction dataset is an essential step in this process. Existing approaches often leverage large language models to automatically explore and generate diverse instructions, ensuring both data diversity and quality. However, they tend to overlook an important factor in real-world applications: on-task relevance. In practice, only a few real-world applications require a truly general-purpose model; most benefit from task-specific knowledge tailored to their particular use case. Therefore, it is vital to develop instruction augmentation methods that not only maintain diversity but are also optimized for specific, real-world scenarios. We thus introduce Task Centric Instruction Augmentation (TCIA), a framework that systematically expands instructions while preserving both diversity and task alignment. By representing instructions in a discrete query-constraints space, TCIA creates a rich set of task-relevant instructions and enables models to generalize to these task-specific instructions without sacrificing overall performance. Experiments show that TCIA improves open-source LLMs' performance by an average of 8.7% across four real-world, task-specific applications, and in some cases outperforming leading closed-source models. These improvements do not compromise general instruction-following ability, making TCIA a scalable and efficient solution for adapting LLMs to real-world, task-focused applications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_20374
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle TCIA: A Task-Centric Instruction Augmentation Method for Instruction Finetuning
Ma, Simin
Liu, Shujian
Tan, Jun
Hu, Yebowen
Wang, Song
Indurthi, Sathish Reddy
Zhao, Sanqiang
Wu, Liwei
Han, Jianbing
Song, Kaiqiang
Artificial Intelligence
Diverse instruction data is vital for effective instruction tuning of large language models, as it enables the model to generalize across different types of inputs . Building such diversified instruction dataset is an essential step in this process. Existing approaches often leverage large language models to automatically explore and generate diverse instructions, ensuring both data diversity and quality. However, they tend to overlook an important factor in real-world applications: on-task relevance. In practice, only a few real-world applications require a truly general-purpose model; most benefit from task-specific knowledge tailored to their particular use case. Therefore, it is vital to develop instruction augmentation methods that not only maintain diversity but are also optimized for specific, real-world scenarios. We thus introduce Task Centric Instruction Augmentation (TCIA), a framework that systematically expands instructions while preserving both diversity and task alignment. By representing instructions in a discrete query-constraints space, TCIA creates a rich set of task-relevant instructions and enables models to generalize to these task-specific instructions without sacrificing overall performance. Experiments show that TCIA improves open-source LLMs' performance by an average of 8.7% across four real-world, task-specific applications, and in some cases outperforming leading closed-source models. These improvements do not compromise general instruction-following ability, making TCIA a scalable and efficient solution for adapting LLMs to real-world, task-focused applications.
title TCIA: A Task-Centric Instruction Augmentation Method for Instruction Finetuning
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20374