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Instruction Induction: From Few Examples to Natural Language Task Descriptions

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arxiv 2205.10782 v1 pith:CXH2XFXP submitted 2022-05-22 cs.CL

Instruction Induction: From Few Examples to Natural Language Task Descriptions

classification cs.CL
keywords instructionlanguageinductionlargenaturaltaskabilitydemonstrations
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Large language models are able to perform a task by conditioning on a few input-output demonstrations - a paradigm known as in-context learning. We show that language models can explicitly infer an underlying task from a few demonstrations by prompting them to generate a natural language instruction that fits the examples. To explore this ability, we introduce the instruction induction challenge, compile a dataset consisting of 24 tasks, and define a novel evaluation metric based on executing the generated instruction. We discover that, to a large extent, the ability to generate instructions does indeed emerge when using a model that is both large enough and aligned to follow instructions; InstructGPT achieves 65.7% of human performance in our execution-based metric, while the original GPT-3 model reaches only 9.8% of human performance. This surprising result suggests that instruction induction might be a viable learning paradigm in and of itself, where instead of fitting a set of latent continuous parameters to the data, one searches for the best description in the natural language hypothesis space.

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