PACIT: Unlocking the Power of Examples for Better In-Context Instruction Tuning

Anonymous

Abstract: Instruction tuning enhances the instruction following ability of large language models by finetuning with supervised instruction data. Previous work proposes in-context instruction tuning (ICIT) where specific positive or negative examples are incorporated into the prompt for better performance. In this work, we propose PACIT, a simple and effective in-context instruction tuning method, inspired by the pedagogical concept of desirable difficulty. The PACIT method unlocks the power of examples by encouraging the model to actively learn to grasp the distinctions between the positive and negative examples instead of merely reading. The model is expected to first verify the correctness of the provided example according to the task description, which is then set as the condition for generating a better response to the task instance. Our extensive experiments prove the effectiveness of PACIT, outperforming ICIT baseline on both in-domain and out-domain tasks up to 9.16 and 3.14 average ROUGE-L scores, respectively. Moreover, PACIT can notably enhance the performance of instruction tuning even when all positive and negative examples are generated with a self-instruct method.

Paper Type: long

Research Area: Generation

Contribution Types: Model analysis & interpretability, NLP engineering experiment, Reproduction study, Approaches to low-resource settings, Publicly available software and/or pre-trained models

Languages Studied: English

Preprint Status: We plan to release a non-anonymous preprint in the next two months (i.e., during the reviewing process).

A1: yes

A1 Elaboration For Yes Or No: See section Limitations(after section 6)

A2: n/a

A3: yes

A3 Elaboration For Yes Or No: see section abstract

B: yes

B1: yes

B1 Elaboration For Yes Or No: See section 4

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B4: yes

B4 Elaboration For Yes Or No: See section 4

B5: yes

B5 Elaboration For Yes Or No: See section 4

B6: yes

B6 Elaboration For Yes Or No: See section 4

C: yes

C1: yes

C1 Elaboration For Yes Or No: See section 4

C2: yes

C2 Elaboration For Yes Or No: See section 4

C3: yes

C3 Elaboration For Yes Or No: See section 4 and section 5

C4: yes

C4 Elaboration For Yes Or No: See section 4

D: no

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E: yes

E1: n/a