The ability of large language models (LLMs) to execute complex instructions is essential for their real-world applications. However, several recent studies indicate that LLMs struggle with challenging instructions. In this paper, we propose Evolutionary Contrastive Distillation (ECD), a novel method for generating high-quality synthetic preference data designed to enhance the complex instruction-following capability of language models. ECD generates data that specifically illustrates the difference between a response that successfully follows a set of complex instructions and a response that is high-quality, but nevertheless makes some subtle mistakes. This is done by prompting LLMs to progressively evolve simple instructions to more complex instructions. When the complexity of an instruction is increased, the original successful response to the original instruction becomes a “hard negative” response for the new instruction, mostly meeting requirements of the new instruction, but barely missing one or two. By pairing a good response with such a hard negative response, and employing contrastive learning algorithms such as DPO, we improve language models’ ability to follow complex instructions. Empirically, we observe that our method yields a 7B model that exceeds the complex instruction-following performance of current SOTA 7B models and is competitive even with open-source 70B models.

Knowledge Distillation (KD) is one of the most effective approaches to deploying large-scale pre-trained language models in low-latency environments by transferring the knowledge contained in the large-scale models to smaller student models. Prior KD approaches use the soft labels and intermediate activations generated by the teacher to transfer knowledge to the student model parameters alone. In this paper, we show that having access to non-parametric memory in the form of a knowledge base with the teacher’s soft labels and predictions can further improve student generalization. To enable the student to retrieve from the knowledge base effectively, we propose a new framework and loss function that preserves the semantic similarities of teacher and student training examples. We show through extensive experiments that our retrieval mechanism can achieve state-of-the-art performance for task-specific knowledge distillation on the GLUE benchmark.

Contrastive learning has been demonstrated effective in unsupervised sentence representation learning. Given one sentence, positive pairs are obtained by passing the sentence to the encoder twice using the different dropout masks, and negative pairs are obtained by taking another sentence in the same mini-batch. However, the method suffers from the surface structure bias, i.e., sentences with similar surface structures will be regarded as close in semantics while sentences with dissimilar surface structures will be viewed as distinct in semantics. This leads to the result that paraphrasing a sentence that is dissimilar in surface structure will receive a lower semantic similarity score than inserting a negative word into the sentence. In this paper, we first verify the bias by collecting a sentence transformation testset. Then we systematically probe the existing models by proposing novel splits based on benchmark datasets in accordance with semantic and surface structure similarity. We tackle the bias in two aspects: balancing the learning target by augmenting with data that counters the bias, and meanwhile preserving word semantics by leveraging recall loss to prevent catastrophic forgetting. We evaluate our model on standard semantic textual similarity (STS) tasks using different pre-trained backbones and achieve state-of-the-art averaged performance across the STS benchmarks. Particularly, our models that are fine-tuned with RoBERTa_base and RoBERTa_large achieve significantly better performance on most benchmark datasets.

Multi-task learning (MTL) aims to solve multiple tasks jointly by sharing a base representation among them. This can lead to more efficient learning and better generalization, as compared to learning each task individually. However, one issue that often arises in MTL is the convergence speed between tasks varies due to differences in task difficulty, so it can be a challenge to simultaneously achieve the best performance on all tasks with a single model checkpoint. Various techniques have been proposed to address discrepancies in task convergence rate, including weighting the per-task losses and modifying task gradients. In this work, we propose a novel approach that avoids the problem of requiring all tasks to converge at the same rate, but rather allows for “asynchronous” convergence among the tasks where each task can converge on its own schedule. As our main contribution, we monitor per-task validation metrics and switch to a knowledge distillation loss once a task has converged instead of continuing to train on the true labels. This prevents the model from overfitting on converged tasks while it learns the remaining tasks. We evaluate the proposed method in two 5-task MTL setups consisting of internal e-commerce datasets. The results show that our method consistently outperforms existing loss weighting and gradient balancing approaches, achieving average improvements of 0.9% and 1.5% over the best performing baseline model in the two setups, respectively.

Recent research has shown that large language models pretrained using unsupervised approaches can achieve significant performance improvement on many downstream tasks. Typically when adapting these language models to downstream tasks, like a classification or regression task, we employ a fine-tuning paradigm in which the sentence representation from the language model is input to a task-specific head; the model is then fine-tuned end-to-end. However, with the emergence of models like GPT-3, prompt-based fine-tuning has been proven to be a successful approach for few-shot tasks. Inspired by this work, we study discrete prompt technologies in practice. There are two issues that arise with the standard prompt approach. First, it can overfit on the prompt template. Second, it requires manual effort to formulate the downstream task as a language model problem. In this paper, we propose an improvement to prompt-based fine-tuning that addresses these two issues. We refer to our approach as DynaMaR – Dynamic Prompt with Mask Token Representation. Results show that DynaMaR can achieve an average improvement of 10% in few-shot settings and improvement of 3.7% in data-rich settings over the standard fine-tuning approach on four e-commerce applications.

In contrast to traditional exhaustive search, selective search first clusters documents into several groups before all the documents are searched exhaustively by a query, to limit the search executed within one group or only a few groups. Selective search is designed to reduce the latency and computation in modern large-scale search systems. In this study, we propose MICO, a Mutual Information CO-training framework for selective search with minimal supervision using the search logs. After training, MICO does not only cluster the documents, but also routes unseen queries to the relevant clusters for efficient retrieval. In our empirical experiments, MICO significantly improves the performance on multiple metrics of selective search and outperforms a number of existing competitive baselines.