The Right Time Matters: Data Arrangement Affects Zero-Shot Generalization in Instruction Tuning
Abstract: Understanding alignment techniques begins with comprehending zero-shot generalization brought by instruction tuning, but little of the mechanism has been understood. Existing work has largely been confined to the task level, without considering that tasks are artificially defined and, to LLMs, merely consist of tokens and representations.
To bridge this gap, we investigate zero-shot generalization from the perspective of the data itself. We first demonstrate that zero-shot generalization happens very early during instruction tuning, with loss serving as a stable indicator.
Next, we investigate training data arrangement through similarity and granularity perspectives, confirming that the timing of exposure to certain training examples may greatly facilitate generalization on unseen tasks.
Finally, we propose a more grounded training data arrangement framework, Test-centric Multi-turn Arrangement, and show its effectiveness in promoting continual learning and further loss reduction. For the first time, we show that zero-shot generalization during instruction tuning is a form of similarity-based generalization between training and test data at the instance level.
Paper Type: Long
Research Area: Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP
Research Area Keywords: data influence
Contribution Types: Model analysis & interpretability, NLP engineering experiment, Approaches to low-resource settings, Publicly available software and/or pre-trained models, Data analysis
Languages Studied: English
Submission Number: 980
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