Instruction fine-tuning enhances the alignment of autoregressive language models (ArLMs) with human intent but relies on large-scale annotated datasets prone to label and text noise. In this paper, we show that existing noise detection techniques designed for autoencoder models (AeLMs) do not directly generalize to ArLMs due to differences in learning dynamics. We propose TDRanker, a novel approach leveraging training dynamics to rank datapoints from easy-to-learn to hard-to-learn, effectively identifying noisy instances. Our method demonstrates robustness across multiple model architectures covering both autoencoder and autoregressive language models (GPT-2, BERT, LaMini-Cerebras-256M) and across various dataset noise levels, achieving at least 2x faster denoising than previous techniques. Applied to real-world classification and generative tasks, TDRanker significantly improves data quality and model performance. These findings suggest that TDRanker provides a scalable solution for refining instruction-tuning datasets, enhancing the reliability of fine-tuned ArLMs in practical applications.

Building a natural language processing (NLP) model can be challenging for end-users such as analysts, journalists, investigators, etc., especially given that they will likely apply existing tools out of the box. In this article, we take a closer look at how two complementary approaches, a state-of-the-art human-in-the-loop (HITL) tool and a generative language model (GPT-3) perform out of the box, that is, without fine-tuning. Concretely, we compare these approaches when end-users with little technical background are given pattern extraction tasks from text. We discover that the HITL tool performs with higher precision, while GPT-3 requires some level of engineering in its input prompts as well as post-processing on its output before it can achieve comparable results. Future work in this space should look further into the advantages and disadvantages of the two approaches, HITL and generative language model, as well as into ways to optimally combine them.