Authors: Changho Lee ; Janghoon Han ; Seonghyeon Ye ; Stanley Jungkyu Choi ; Honglak Lee ; Kyunghoon Bae
Summary: Instruction tuning has shown its ability to not only enhance zero-shot generalization across various tasks but also its effectiveness in improving the performance of specific tasks. A crucial aspect in instruction tuning for a particular task is a strategic selection of related tasks that offer meaningful supervision, thereby enhancing efficiency and preventing performance degradation from irrelevant tasks. Our research reveals that leveraging instruction information \textit{alone} enables the identification of pertinent tasks for instruction tuning. This approach is notably simpler compared to traditional methods that necessitate complex measurements of pairwise transferability between tasks or the creation of data samples for the target task. Furthermore, by additionally learning the unique instructional template style of the meta-dataset, we observe an improvement in task selection accuracy, which contributes to enhanced overall performance. Experimental results demonstrate that training on a small set of tasks, chosen solely based on the instructions, leads to substantial performance improvements on benchmarks like P3, Big-Bench, NIV2, and Big-Bench Hard. Significantly, these improvements exceed those achieved by prior task selection methods, highlighting the efficacy of our approach.
Instruction Matters, a Simple yet Effective Task Selection Approach in Instruction Tuning for Specific Tasks
https://papers.cool/arxiv/2404.16418
Authors: Changho Lee ; Janghoon Han ; Seonghyeon Ye ; Stanley Jungkyu Choi ; Honglak Lee ; Kyunghoon Bae
Summary: Instruction tuning has shown its ability to not only enhance zero-shot generalization across various tasks but also its effectiveness in improving the performance of specific tasks. A crucial aspect in instruction tuning for a particular task is a strategic selection of related tasks that offer meaningful supervision, thereby enhancing efficiency and preventing performance degradation from irrelevant tasks. Our research reveals that leveraging instruction information \textit{alone} enables the identification of pertinent tasks for instruction tuning. This approach is notably simpler compared to traditional methods that necessitate complex measurements of pairwise transferability between tasks or the creation of data samples for the target task. Furthermore, by additionally learning the unique instructional template style of the meta-dataset, we observe an improvement in task selection accuracy, which contributes to enhanced overall performance. Experimental results demonstrate that training on a small set of tasks, chosen solely based on the instructions, leads to substantial performance improvements on benchmarks like P3, Big-Bench, NIV2, and Big-Bench Hard. Significantly, these improvements exceed those achieved by prior task selection methods, highlighting the efficacy of our approach.
想象一下，你想学习一门新语言，你会怎么做？你可能会找一位老师，或者参加一些课程，对吧？其实，训练人工智能（AI）也类似，我们需要给AI提供合适的“学习资料”和“老师”，才能让它变得更聪明。
今天，我们要聊的就是AI训练中一个重要的环节——任务选择。就像我们需要选择合适的老师和课程一样，训练AI时也需要挑选合适的任务来让它学习。
为什么要挑选任务？
目前，训练AI的一种流行方法叫做指令调整。简单来说，就是让AI学习各种各样的任务，从而提高它在未见过任务上的表现。但这带来一个问题：如何选择合适的任务来训练AI呢？
如果我们随便挑选一些任务，可能会导致AI学到一些无关的知识，甚至影响它的性能。这就好像你学习英语，却不小心混入了法语和西班牙语的课程，结果可能会让你更加困惑。
如何挑选合适的任务？
为了解决这个问题，研究人员提出了一种新的方法，叫做基于指令的任务选择（INSTA）。这个方法的核心思想是：通过分析任务的指令，来判断任务之间的相关性。
举个例子，假设我们想训练AI完成“写一首关于猫的诗”这个任务。INSTA会分析这个任务的指令，然后在大量的任务库中寻找与之相关的任务，比如“写一首关于狗的诗”、“描述猫的外貌特征”等等。
通过这种方式，INSTA可以帮助我们挑选出与目标任务相关的任务，从而让AI更高效地学习，避免学习到无关的知识。
INSTA的效果如何？
研究人员通过实验验证了INSTA的有效性。他们发现，使用INSTA挑选的任务训练出来的AI，在各种任务上的表现都比随机挑选任务训练出来的AI更好。
未来展望
INSTA为AI训练提供了一种新的思路，但也有一些可以进一步探索的方向：
总而言之，INSTA为我们提供了一种有效的方法来挑选合适的任务来训练AI，让AI变得更聪明，更能理解我们的指令。随着研究的不断深入，相信AI会在未来发挥更大的作用，为我们的生活带来更多便利。