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arXiv:2212.10560cs.CL

Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions

Yizhong Wang, Yeganeh Kordi, Swaroop Mishra, Alisa Liu, Noah A. Smith, Daniel Khashabi, Hannaneh Hajishirzi

Abstract

Large "instruction-tuned" language models (i.e., finetuned to respond to instructions) have demonstrated a remarkable ability to generalize zero-shot to new tasks. Nevertheless, they depend heavily on human-written instruction data that is often limited in quantity, diversity, and creativity, therefore hindering the generality of the tuned model. We introduce Self-Instruct, a framework for improving the instruction-following capabilities of pretrained language models by bootstrapping off their own generations. Our pipeline generates instructions, input, and output samples from a language model, then filters invalid or similar ones before using them to finetune the original model. Applying our method to the vanilla GPT3, we demonstrate a 33% absolute improvement over the original model on Super-NaturalInstructions, on par with the performance of InstructGPT-001, which was trained with private user data and human annotations. For further evaluation, we curate a set of expert-written instructions for novel tasks, and show through human evaluation that tuning GPT3 with Self-Instruct outperforms using existing public instruction datasets by a large margin, leaving only a 5% absolute gap behind InstructGPT-001. Self-Instruct provides an almost annotation-free method for aligning pre-trained language models with instructions, and we release our large synthetic dataset to facilitate future studies on instruction tuning. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/yizhongw/self-instruct.

arXiv comments
ACL 2023 camera ready, 23 pages, 9 figures, 11 tables
Journal reference
DOI
Subjects
cs.CLComputation and Language cs.AIArtificial Intelligence

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Linked by 7 identifiable commenters in 7 comments across 7 threads, from Mar 2023 to Jan 2025. Found in 1 HN submission from Apr 2023 to Apr 2023. Open submission discussions.

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Discussed in comments7 threads

  1. AI Engineer Reading List 1 comment
    • I think most of the instruction fine-tuning methods for oss models stem from Alpaca, so it should be included: https://crfm.stanford.edu/2023/03/13/alpaca.html And the one referenced in there on synthetic data generation: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.10560

      lxeView on HNParent context

    • It has existed for years: Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.10560 airoboros: using large language models to fine-tune large language models https://github.com/jondurbin/airoboros

      suprjamiView on HNParent context

    • Since nobody is actually recommending papers, here's an incomplete reading list that I sent out to some masters students I work with so they can understand the current research (academic) my little team is doing: Paper reference / main takeaways / link instructGPT / main…

      hapaninView on HNParent context

    • There have been other approaches to make instruction tuning easier. This one proceeds largely on self generated synthetic data: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.10560

      cubefoxView on HNParent context

    • For those skeptical of the above comment, this technique absolutely works and powers production-grade models like Anthropic’s Claude. There’s plenty of literature on this, but here are a couple papers that might be helpful for people doing their own training: - Constitutional…

      jkeislingView on HNParent context

    • Alpaca uses Self-Instruct[0] which is better than just the pre-training but I wouldn't expect it to be at the level of ChatGPT (RLHF) in terms of human-friendly prompting. OpenAssistant should make it close to ChatGPT (from GPT-3.5 version) if the LLaMA is as powerful as…

      f_devdView on HNParent context

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