Exploring Format Consistency for Instruction Tuning

Shihao Liang, Runchu Tian, Kunlun Zhu, Yujia Qin, Huadong Wang, Xin Cong, Zhiyuan Liu, Xiaojiang Liu, Maosong Sun

Abstract: Instruction tuning has emerged as a promising approach to enhancing large language models in following human instructions. It is shown that increasing the diversity and number of instructions in the training data can consistently enhance generalization performance, which facilitates a recent endeavor to collect various instructions and integrate existing instruction tuning datasets into larger collections. However, different users have their unique ways of expressing instructions, and there often exist variations across different datasets in the instruction styles and formats, i.e., format inconsistency. In this work, a framework named Unified Instruction Tuning (UIT) is proposed, which calls OpenAI APIs for automatic format transfer among different instruction tuning datasets such as PromptSource, FLAN and CrossFit. With the framework, we (1) demonstrate the necessity of maintaining format consistency in instruction tuning; (2) improve the generalization performance on unseen instructions on T5-LM-xl; (3) provide a novel perplexity-based denoising method to reduce the noise of automatic format transfer to make the UIT framework more practical and a smaller offline model based on GPT-J that achieves comparable format transfer capability to OpenAI APIs to reduce costs in practice. Further analysis regarding variations of targeted formats and other effects is intended. The code and trained models will soon be available.

Submission Length: Regular submission (no more than 12 pages of main content)

Changes Since Last Submission:

- Add more specific results to the abstract and conclusion
- Change some tables into plots for better readability
- Add more examples to the appendices
- Add training hyper-parameters details to the appendices
- Fix some nits and inappropriate expressions.

Code: https://github.com/thunlp/UnifiedInstructionTuning

Assigned Action Editor: ~Yunhe_Wang1

License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Submission Number: 1585