How Many Data Samples is an Additional Instruction Worth?

Ravsehaj Singh Puri, Swaroop Mishra, Mihir Parmar, Chitta Baral


Abstract
Recently introduced instruction-paradigm empowers non-expert users to leverage NLP resources by defining a new task in natural language. Instruction-tuned models have significantly outperformed multitask learning models (without instruction); however they are far from state-of-the-art task-specific models. Conventional approaches to improve model performance via creating datasets with large number of task instances or architectural changes in the model may not be feasible for non-expert users. However, they can write alternate instructions to represent an instruction task. Is Instruction-augmentation helpful? We augment a subset of tasks in the expanded version of NATURAL INSTRUCTIONS with additional instructions and find that it significantly improves model performance (up to 35%), especially in the low-data regime. Our results indicate that an additional instruction can be equivalent to ~200 data samples on average across tasks.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-eacl.77
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2023
Month:
May
Year:
2023
Address:
Dubrovnik, Croatia
Editors:
Andreas Vlachos, Isabelle Augenstein
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1042–1057
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-eacl.77
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-eacl.77
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ravsehaj Singh Puri, Swaroop Mishra, Mihir Parmar, and Chitta Baral. 2023. How Many Data Samples is an Additional Instruction Worth?. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2023, pages 1042–1057, Dubrovnik, Croatia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
How Many Data Samples is an Additional Instruction Worth? (Puri et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-eacl.77.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-eacl.77.mp4