Phased Instruction Fine-Tuning for Large Language Models

Wei Pang, Chuan Zhou, Xiao-Hua Zhou, Xiaojie Wang


Abstract
Instruction Fine-Tuning, a method enhancing pre-trained language models’ capabilities from mere next-word prediction to complex instruction following, often employs a one-off training approach on diverse instruction dataset. However, this method may not effectively enhance models’ adherence to instructions due to the simultaneous handling of varying instruction complexities. To address this, we propose a novel phased instruction fine-tuning (Phased IFT) method, grounded in the hypothesis of progressive alignment, which posits that the transition of a pre-trained language model from simple next-word prediction to sophisticated instruction following is a gradual learning process. Specifically, we obtain the score of difficulty for each instruction via GPT-4, stratify the instruction data into subsets of increasing difficulty, and sequentially uptrain on these subsets using the standard supervised loss. Through extensive experiments on the pre-trained models Llama-2 7B/13B, and Mistral-7B using the 52K Alpaca instruction data, we demonstrate that Phased IFT significantly surpasses traditional one-off instruction fine-tuning (One-off IFT) method in win rate, empirically validating the progressive alignment hypothesis. Our findings suggest that Phased IFT offers a simple yet effective pathway for elevating the instruction-following capabilities of pre-trained language models.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.341
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5735–5748
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.341
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.341
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wei Pang, Chuan Zhou, Xiao-Hua Zhou, and Xiaojie Wang. 2024. Phased Instruction Fine-Tuning for Large Language Models. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024, pages 5735–5748, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Phased Instruction Fine-Tuning for Large Language Models (Pang et al., Findings 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.341.pdf