Xiaobo Xia


2024

pdf bib
One-Shot Learning as Instruction Data Prospector for Large Language Models
Yunshui Li | Binyuan Hui | Xiaobo Xia | Jiaxi Yang | Min Yang | Lei Zhang | Shuzheng Si | Ling-Hao Chen | Junhao Liu | Tongliang Liu | Fei Huang | Yongbin Li
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Contemporary practices in instruction tuning often hinge on enlarging data scaling without a clear strategy for ensuring data quality, inadvertently introducing noise that may compromise model performance. To address this challenge, we introduce Nuggets, a novel and efficient methodology that leverages one-shot learning to discern and select high-quality instruction data from extensive datasets. Nuggets assesses the potential of individual instruction examples to act as effective one-shot learning instances, thereby identifying those that can significantly improve performance across diverse tasks. Nuggets utilizes a scoring system based on the impact of candidate examples on the perplexity of a diverse anchor set, facilitating the selection of the most advantageous data for instruction tuning. Through rigorous evaluations on two benchmarks, namely MT-Bench and Alpaca-Eval, our study illustrates that instruction tuning with the top 1% of examples curated by Nuggets substantially outperforms conventional methods employing the entire dataset.