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Unnatural Instructions: Tuning Language Models with (Almost) No Human Labor

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arxiv 2212.09689 v1 pith:XRVBHSEL submitted 2022-12-19 cs.CL cs.AIcs.LG

Unnatural Instructions: Tuning Language Models with (Almost) No Human Labor

classification cs.CL cs.AIcs.LG
keywords instructionslanguageexampleshumanmodelsunnaturaldatasetdatasets
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Instruction tuning enables pretrained language models to perform new tasks from inference-time natural language descriptions. These approaches rely on vast amounts of human supervision in the form of crowdsourced datasets or user interactions. In this work, we introduce Unnatural Instructions: a large dataset of creative and diverse instructions, collected with virtually no human labor. We collect 64,000 examples by prompting a language model with three seed examples of instructions and eliciting a fourth. This set is then expanded by prompting the model to rephrase each instruction, creating a total of approximately 240,000 examples of instructions, inputs, and outputs. Experiments show that despite containing a fair amount of noise, training on Unnatural Instructions rivals the effectiveness of training on open-source manually-curated datasets, surpassing the performance of models such as T0++ and Tk-Instruct across various benchmarks. These results demonstrate the potential of model-generated data as a cost-effective alternative to crowdsourcing for dataset expansion and diversification.

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Forward citations

Cited by 17 Pith papers

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