MAmmoTH2: Scaling Instructions from the Web

Xiang Yue, Tianyu Zheng, Ge Zhang, Wenhu Chen

Keywords: large language models, instruction tuning, reasoning

TL;DR: We introduce a scalable approach to harvest 10M high-quality instruction data from web corpus for fine-tuning language models, significantly boosting their reasoning performance without costly human annotation or GPT-4 distillation.

Abstract: Instruction tuning improves the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs), with data quality and scalability being the crucial factors. Most instruction tuning data come from human crowd-sourcing or GPT-4 distillation. We propose a paradigm to efficiently harvest 10 million naturally existing instruction data from the pre-training web corpus to enhance LLM reasoning. Our approach involves (1) recalling relevant documents, (2) extracting instruction-response pairs, and (3) refining the extracted pairs using open-source LLMs. Fine-tuning base LLMs on this dataset, we build MAmmoTH2 models, which significantly boost performance on reasoning benchmarks. Notably, MAmmoTH2-7B’s (Mistral) performance increases from 11% to 36.7% on MATH and from 36% to 68.4% on GSM8K without training on any in-domain data. Further training MAmmoTH2 on public instruction tuning datasets yields MAmmoTH2-Plus, achieving state-of-the-art performance on several reasoning and chatbot benchmarks. Our work demonstrates how to harvest large-scale, high-quality instruction data without costly human annotation or GPT-4 distillation, providing a new paradigm for building better instruction tuning data.

Primary Area: Natural language processing

Submission Number: 5479