Dynosaur: A Dynamic Growth Paradigm for Instruction-Tuning Data Curation

Da Yin, Xiao Liu, Fan Yin, Ming Zhong, Hritik Bansal, Jiawei Han, Kai-Wei Chang


Abstract
Instruction tuning has emerged to enhance the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to comprehend instructions and generate appropriate responses. Existing methods either manually annotate or employ LLM (e.g., GPT-series) to generate data for instruction tuning. However, they often overlook associating instructions with existing annotated datasets. In this paper, we propose Dynosaur, a dynamic growth paradigm for the automatic curation of instruction-tuning data. Based on the metadata of existing datasets, we use LLMs to automatically construct instruction-tuning data by identifying relevant data fields and generating appropriate instructions. By leveraging the existing annotated datasets, Dynosaur offers several advantages: 1) it reduces the API cost for generating instructions (e.g., it costs less than $12 USD by calling GPT-3.5-turbo for generating 800K instruction tuning samples; 2) it provides high-quality data for instruction tuning (e.g., it performs better than Alpaca and Flan on Super-NI and Longform with comparable data sizes); and 3) it supports the continuous improvement of models by generating instruction-tuning data when a new annotated dataset becomes available. We further investigate a continual learning scheme for learning with the ever-growing instruction-tuning dataset, and demonstrate that replaying tasks with diverse instruction embeddings not only helps mitigate forgetting issues but generalizes to unseen tasks better. Code and data are available at https://github.com/WadeYin9712/Dynosaur.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.245
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4031–4047
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.245
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.245
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Da Yin, Xiao Liu, Fan Yin, Ming Zhong, Hritik Bansal, Jiawei Han, and Kai-Wei Chang. 2023. Dynosaur: A Dynamic Growth Paradigm for Instruction-Tuning Data Curation. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 4031–4047, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Dynosaur: A Dynamic Growth Paradigm for Instruction-Tuning Data Curation (Yin et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.245.pdf