SELF-GUIDE: Better Task-Specific Instruction Following via Self-Synthetic Finetuning

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2407.12874v2
• Date: Mon, 12 Aug 2024 00:38:22 GMT
• Title: SELF-GUIDE: Better Task-Specific Instruction Following via Self-Synthetic Finetuning
• Authors: Chenyang Zhao, Xueying Jia, Vijay Viswanathan, Tongshuang Wu, Graham Neubig,
• Abstract summary: Large language models (LLMs) hold the promise of solving diverse tasks when provided with appropriate natural language prompts. We propose SELF-GUIDE, a multi-stage mechanism in which we synthesize task-specific input-output pairs from the student LLM. We report an absolute improvement of approximately 15% for classification tasks and 18% for generation tasks in the benchmark's metrics.
• Score: 70.21358720599821
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) hold the promise of solving diverse tasks when provided with appropriate natural language prompts. However, prompting often leads models to make predictions with lower accuracy compared to finetuning a model with ample training data. On the other hand, while finetuning LLMs on task-specific data generally improves their performance, abundant annotated datasets are not available for all tasks. Previous work has explored generating task-specific data from state-of-the-art LLMs and using this data to finetune smaller models, but this approach requires access to a language model other than the one being trained, which introduces cost, scalability challenges, and legal hurdles associated with continuously relying on more powerful LLMs. In response to these, we propose SELF-GUIDE, a multi-stage mechanism in which we synthesize task-specific input-output pairs from the student LLM, then use these input-output pairs to finetune the student LLM itself. In our empirical evaluation of the Natural Instructions V2 benchmark, we find that SELF-GUIDE improves the performance of LLM by a substantial margin. Specifically, we report an absolute improvement of approximately 15% for classification tasks and 18% for generation tasks in the benchmark's metrics. This sheds light on the promise of self-synthesized data guiding LLMs towards becoming task-specific experts without any external learning signals.

Related papers

• Forewarned is Forearmed: Leveraging LLMs for Data Synthesis through Failure-Inducing Exploration [90.41908331897639]
  Large language models (LLMs) have significantly benefited from training on diverse, high-quality task-specific data. We present a novel approach, ReverseGen, designed to automatically generate effective training samples.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-10-22T06:43:28Z)
• Learning to Reduce: Optimal Representations of Structured Data in Prompting Large Language Models [42.16047343029512]
  Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely used as general-purpose AI agents. We propose a framework, Learning to Reduce, that fine-tunes a language model to generate a reduced version of an input context. We show that our model achieves comparable accuracies in selecting the relevant evidence from an input context.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-02-22T00:41:23Z)
• Small LLMs Are Weak Tool Learners: A Multi-LLM Agent [73.54562551341454]
  Large Language Model (LLM) agents significantly extend the capabilities of standalone LLMs. We propose a novel approach that decomposes the aforementioned capabilities into a planner, caller, and summarizer. This modular framework facilitates individual updates and the potential use of smaller LLMs for building each capability.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-01-14T16:17:07Z)
• Self-Play Fine-Tuning Converts Weak Language Models to Strong Language Models [52.98743860365194]
  We propose a new fine-tuning method called Self-Play fIne-tuNing (SPIN) At the heart of SPIN lies a self-play mechanism, where the LLM refines its capability by playing against instances of itself. This sheds light on the promise of self-play, enabling the achievement of human-level performance in LLMs without the need for expert opponents.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-01-02T18:53:13Z)
• LLMaAA: Making Large Language Models as Active Annotators [32.57011151031332]
  We propose LLMaAA, which takes large language models as annotators and puts them into an active learning loop to determine what to annotate efficiently. We conduct experiments and analysis on two classic NLP tasks, named entity recognition and relation extraction. With LLMaAA, task-specific models trained from LLM-generated labels can outperform the teacher within only hundreds of annotated examples.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-10-30T14:54:15Z)
• TRACE: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Continual Learning in Large Language Models [52.734140807634624]
  Aligned large language models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional capabilities in task-solving, following instructions, and ensuring safety. Existing continual learning benchmarks lack sufficient challenge for leading aligned LLMs. We introduce TRACE, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate continual learning in LLMs.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-10-10T16:38:49Z)
• Small Language Models Improve Giants by Rewriting Their Outputs [18.025736098795296]
  We tackle the problem of leveraging training data to improve the performance of large language models (LLMs) without fine-tuning. We create a pool of candidates from the LLM through few-shot prompting and we employ a compact model, the LM-corrector (LMCor), specifically trained to merge these candidates to produce an enhanced output. Experiments on four natural language generation tasks demonstrate that even a small LMCor model (250M) substantially improves the few-shot performance of LLMs (62B), matching and even outperforming standard fine-tuning.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-05-22T22:07:50Z)
• LLM-Pruner: On the Structural Pruning of Large Language Models [65.02607075556742]
  Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in language understanding and generation. We tackle the compression of LLMs within the bound of two constraints: being task-agnostic and minimizing the reliance on the original training dataset. Our method, named LLM-Pruner, adopts structural pruning that selectively removes non-critical coupled structures.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-05-19T12:10:53Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.