PACIT: Unlocking the Power of Examples for Better In-Context Instruction Tuning

Tianci Xue, Ziqi Wang, Yixia Li, Yun Chen, Guanhua Chen


Abstract
Instruction tuning enhances the instruction following ability of large language models by finetuning with supervised instruction data. Previous work proposes in-context instruction tuning (ICIT) where specific positive or negative examples are incorporated into the prompt for better performance. In this work, we propose PACIT, a simple and effective in-context instruction tuning method, inspired by the pedagogical concept of desirable difficulty. The PACIT method unlocks the power of examples by encouraging the model to actively learn to grasp the distinctions between the positive and negative examples instead of merely reading. The model is expected to first verify the correctness of the provided example according to the task description, which is then set as the condition for generating a better response to the task instance. Our extensive experiments prove the effectiveness of PACIT, outperforming ICIT baseline on both in-domain and out-domain tasks up to 9.16 and 3.14 average ROUGE-L scores, respectively. Moreover, PACIT can notably enhance the performance of instruction tuning even when all positive and negative examples are generated with a self-instruct method.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.36
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
654–665
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.36
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tianci Xue, Ziqi Wang, Yixia Li, Yun Chen, and Guanhua Chen. 2024. PACIT: Unlocking the Power of Examples for Better In-Context Instruction Tuning. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024, pages 654–665, Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
PACIT: Unlocking the Power of Examples for Better In-Context Instruction Tuning (Xue et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.36.pdf