Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models
Abstract
Finetuning language models on a collection of datasets phrased as instructions has been shown to improve model performance and generalization to unseen tasks. In this paper we explore instruction finetuning with a particular focus on (1) scaling the number of tasks, (2) scaling the model size, and (3) finetuning on chain-of-thought data. We find that instruction finetuning with the above aspects dramatically improves performance on a variety of model classes (PaLM, T5, U-PaLM), prompting setups (zero-shot, few-shot, CoT), and evaluation benchmarks (MMLU, BBH, TyDiQA, MGSM, open-ended generation, RealToxicityPrompts). For instance, Flan-PaLM 540B instruction-finetuned on 1.8K tasks outperforms PaLM 540B by a large margin (+9.4% on average). Flan-PaLM 540B achieves state-of-the-art performance on several benchmarks (at time of release), such as 75.2% on five-shot MMLU. We also publicly release Flan-T5 checkpoints,1 which achieve strong few-shot performance even compared to much larger models, such as PaLM 62B. Overall, instruction finetuning is a general method for improving the performance and usability of pretrained language models.
Cite
Text
Chung et al. "Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models." Journal of Machine Learning Research, 2024.Markdown
[Chung et al. "Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models." Journal of Machine Learning Research, 2024.](https://mlanthology.org/jmlr/2024/chung2024jmlr-scaling/)BibTeX
@article{chung2024jmlr-scaling,
title = {{Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models}},
author = {Chung, Hyung Won and Hou, Le and Longpre, Shayne and Zoph, Barret and Tay, Yi and Fedus, William and Li, Yunxuan and Wang, Xuezhi and Dehghani, Mostafa and Brahma, Siddhartha and Webson, Albert and Gu, Shixiang Shane and Dai, Zhuyun and Suzgun, Mirac and Chen, Xinyun and Chowdhery, Aakanksha and Castro-Ros, Alex and Pellat, Marie and Robinson, Kevin and Valter, Dasha and Narang, Sharan and Mishra, Gaurav and Yu, Adams and Zhao, Vincent and Huang, Yanping and Dai, Andrew and Yu, Hongkun and Petrov, Slav and Chi, Ed H. and Dean, Jeff and Devlin, Jacob and Roberts, Adam and Zhou, Denny and Le, Quoc V. and Wei, Jason},
journal = {Journal of Machine Learning Research},
year = {2024},
pages = {1-53},
volume = {25},
url = {https://mlanthology.org/jmlr/2024/chung2024jmlr-scaling/}
}