> Wang, Yizhong, and Jhu Cs. Instruction Tuning of Large Language Models.
# Instruction Tuning of Large Language Models
- NLP before 2018: task-specific models
- Multi-task learning (MTL) could not generalize to unseen tasks
- ==**Instructions enable models to generalize over multiple tasks**==
- Significant improvement of LLM performance
- Need for expert-written instructions for each task
- Most important factors: diverse tasks (rather than more data for single task), bigger models, good instructions or in-context examples
- Crowdsourcing is no good because writing instructions requires creativity and expertise
- BUT ==**we can use LLMs to generate instructions and instances**==!
- GPT-3 gives fairly good data (all fields are valid in 54% of cases)
- Self-Instruct boosts GPT-3 by 33.1%, almost as good as InstructGPT
- More instructions -> better performance
- **OpenAI licensing issues -> use open-source models like LLaMa**
## 🔍 See also
- [Super-NaturalInstructions: Generalization via Declarative Instructions on 1600+ NLP Tasks](https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.07705)
- [Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions](https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.10560)
- GitHub repo : <https://github.com/yizhongw/self-instruct>