Aligning Instruction Tuning with Pre-training

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2501.09368v3
• Date: Mon, 20 Jan 2025 14:05:35 GMT
• Title: Aligning Instruction Tuning with Pre-training
• Authors: Yiming Liang, Tianyu Zheng, Xinrun Du, Ge Zhang, Jiaheng Liu, Xingwei Qu, Wenqiang Zu, Xingrun Xing, Chujie Zheng, Lei Ma, Wenhu Chen, Guoyin Wang, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Wenhao Huang, Xiang Yue, Jiajun Zhang,
• Abstract summary: We propose Aligning Instruction Tuning with Pre-training (AITP) to align instruction tuning with pre-training distributions. We show consistent performance improvements with AITP on three fully open large language models (LLMs) across eight benchmarks.
• Score: 81.4748965653345
• License:
• Abstract: Instruction tuning enhances large language models (LLMs) to follow human instructions across diverse tasks, relying on high-quality datasets to guide behavior. However, these datasets, whether manually curated or synthetically generated, are often narrowly focused and misaligned with the broad distributions captured during pre-training, limiting LLM generalization and effective use of pre-trained knowledge. We propose Aligning Instruction Tuning with Pre-training (AITP), a method that bridges this gap by identifying coverage shortfalls in instruction-tuning datasets and rewriting underrepresented pre-training data into high-quality instruction-response pairs. This approach enriches dataset diversity while preserving task-specific objectives. Evaluations on three fully open LLMs across eight benchmarks demonstrate consistent performance improvements with AITP. Ablations highlight the benefits of adaptive data selection, controlled rewriting, and balanced integration, emphasizing the importance of aligning instruction tuning with pre-training distributions to unlock the full potential of LLMs.

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