Enhancing NLU in Large Language Models Using Adversarial Noisy Instruction Tuning

Shengyuan Bai, Qibin Li, Zhe Wang, Nai Zhou, Nianmin Yao

Abstract: Instruction tuning has emerged as an effective approach that notably improves large language models (LLMs) performance, showing particular promise in natural language generation tasks by producing more diverse, coherent, and task-relevant outputs. However, extending instruction tuning to natural language understanding (NLU) tasks presents significant challenges, primarily due to the difficulty in achieving high-precision responses and the scarcity of large-scale, high-quality instruction data necessary for effective tuning. In this work, we introduce Adversarial Noisy Instruction Tuning (ANIT) to improve NLU performance on LLMs. First, we leverage low-resource techniques to construct noisy instruction datasets. Second, we employ semantic distortion-aware techniques to quantify the intensity of noise within these instructions. Last, we devise an adversarial training method that incorporates a noise response strategy to achieve noisy instruction tuning. ANIT enhances LLMs capability to detect and accommodate semantic distortions in noisy instructions, thereby augmenting their comprehension of task objectives and ability to generate more accurate responses. We evaluate our approach across diverse noisy instructions and semantic distortion quantification methods on multiple NLU tasks. Comprehensive empirical results demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing approaches across various experimental settings.