Daily Papers

We introduce XFT, a simple yet powerful training scheme, by simply merging upcycled Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) to unleash the performance limit of instruction-tuned code Large Language Models (LLMs). While vanilla sparse upcycling fails to improve instruction tuning, XFT introduces a shared expert mechanism with a novel routing weight normalization strategy into sparse upcycling, which significantly boosts instruction tuning. After fine-tuning the upcycled MoE model, XFT introduces a learnable model merging mechanism to compile the upcycled MoE model back to a dense model, achieving upcycled MoE-level performance with only dense-model compute. By applying XFT to a 1.3B model, we create a new state-of-the-art tiny code LLM (<3B) with 67.1 and 64.6 pass@1 on HumanEval and HumanEval+ respectively. With the same data and model architecture, XFT improves supervised fine-tuning (SFT) by 13% on HumanEval+, along with consistent improvements from 2% to 13% on MBPP+, MultiPL-E, and DS-1000, demonstrating its generalizability. XFT is fully orthogonal to existing techniques such as Evol-Instruct and OSS-Instruct, opening a new dimension for improving code instruction tuning. Codes are available at https://github.com/ise-uiuc/xft .

Recent advancement in code understanding and generation demonstrates that code LLMs fine-tuned on a high-quality instruction dataset can gain powerful capabilities to address wide-ranging code-related tasks. However, most previous existing methods mainly view each programming language in isolation and ignore the knowledge transfer among different programming languages. To bridge the gap among different programming languages, we introduce a novel multi-agent collaboration framework to enhance multilingual instruction tuning for code LLMs, where multiple language-specific intelligent agent components with generation memory work together to transfer knowledge from one language to another efficiently and effectively. Specifically, we first generate the language-specific instruction data from the code snippets and then provide the generated data as the seed data for language-specific agents. Multiple language-specific agents discuss and collaborate to formulate a new instruction and its corresponding solution (A new programming language or existing programming language), To further encourage the cross-lingual transfer, each agent stores its generation history as memory and then summarizes its merits and faults. Finally, the high-quality multilingual instruction data is used to encourage knowledge transfer among different programming languages to train Qwen2.5-xCoder. Experimental results on multilingual programming benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance of Qwen2.5-xCoder in sharing common knowledge, highlighting its potential to reduce the cross-lingual gap.

Code Large Language Models (Code LLMs) have demonstrated outstanding performance in code-related tasks. Several instruction tuning approaches have been proposed to boost the code generation performance of pre-trained Code LLMs. In this paper, we introduce a diverse instruction model (DolphCoder) with self-evaluating for code generation. It learns diverse instruction targets and combines a code evaluation objective to enhance its code generation ability. Our model achieves superior performance on the HumanEval and MBPP benchmarks, demonstrating new insights for future code instruction tuning work. Our key findings are: (1) Augmenting more diverse responses with distinct reasoning paths increases the code capability of LLMs. (2) Improving one's ability to evaluate the correctness of code solutions also enhances their ability to create it.

Recently, there has been a growing interest in studying how to construct better code instruction tuning data. However, we observe Code models trained with these datasets exhibit high performance on HumanEval but perform worse on other benchmarks such as LiveCodeBench. Upon further investigation, we find that many datasets suffer from severe data leakage. After cleaning up most of the leaked data, some well-known high-quality datasets perform poorly. This discovery reveals a new challenge: identifying which dataset genuinely qualify as high-quality code instruction data. To address this, we propose an efficient code data pruning strategy for selecting good samples. Our approach is based on three dimensions: instruction complexity, response quality, and instruction diversity. Based on our selected data, we present XCoder, a family of models finetuned from LLaMA3. Our experiments show XCoder achieves new state-of-the-art performance using fewer training data, which verify the effectiveness of our data strategy. Moreover, we perform a comprehensive analysis on the data composition and find existing code datasets have different characteristics according to their construction methods, which provide new insights for future code LLMs. Our models and dataset are released in https://github.com/banksy23/XCoder

Finetuning large language models (LLMs) on instructions leads to vast performance improvements on natural language tasks. We apply instruction tuning using code, leveraging the natural structure of Git commits, which pair code changes with human instructions. We compile CommitPack: 4 terabytes of Git commits across 350 programming languages. We benchmark CommitPack against other natural and synthetic code instructions (xP3x, Self-Instruct, OASST) on the 16B parameter StarCoder model, and achieve state-of-the-art performance among models not trained on OpenAI outputs, on the HumanEval Python benchmark (46.2% pass@1). We further introduce HumanEvalPack, expanding the HumanEval benchmark to a total of 3 coding tasks (Code Repair, Code Explanation, Code Synthesis) across 6 languages (Python, JavaScript, Java, Go, C++, Rust). Our models, OctoCoder and OctoGeeX, achieve the best performance across HumanEvalPack among all permissive models, demonstrating CommitPack's benefits in generalizing to a wider set of languages and natural coding tasks. Code, models and data are freely available at https://github.com/bigcode-project/octopack.

The high cost of full-parameter fine-tuning (FFT) of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to a series of parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods. However, it remains unclear which methods provide the best cost-performance trade-off at different model scales. We introduce Astraios, a suite of 28 instruction-tuned OctoCoder models using 7 tuning methods and 4 model sizes up to 16 billion parameters. Through investigations across 5 tasks and 8 different datasets encompassing both code comprehension and code generation tasks, we find that FFT generally leads to the best downstream performance across all scales, and PEFT methods differ significantly in their efficacy based on the model scale. LoRA usually offers the most favorable trade-off between cost and performance. Further investigation into the effects of these methods on both model robustness and code security reveals that larger models tend to demonstrate reduced robustness and less security. At last, we explore the relationships among updated parameters, cross-entropy loss, and task performance. We find that the tuning effectiveness observed in small models generalizes well to larger models, and the validation loss in instruction tuning can be a reliable indicator of overall downstream performance.

Recent advancements in open-source code large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable coding abilities by fine-tuning on the data generated from powerful closed-source LLMs such as GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 for instruction tuning. This paper explores how to further improve an instruction-tuned code LLM by generating data from itself rather than querying closed-source LLMs. Our key observation is the misalignment between the translation of formal and informal languages: translating formal language (i.e., code) to informal language (i.e., natural language) is more straightforward than the reverse. Based on this observation, we propose INVERSE-INSTRUCT, which summarizes instructions from code snippets instead of the reverse. Specifically, given an instruction tuning corpus for code and the resulting instruction-tuned code LLM, we ask the code LLM to generate additional high-quality instructions for the original corpus through code summarization and self-evaluation. Then, we fine-tune the base LLM on the combination of the original corpus and the self-generated one, which yields a stronger instruction-tuned LLM. We present a series of code LLMs named InverseCoder, which surpasses the performance of the original code LLMs on a wide range of benchmarks, including Python text-to-code generation, multilingual coding, and data-science code generation.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown impressive success across modalities such as image, video, and audio in a variety of understanding and generation tasks. However, current MLLMs are surprisingly poor at understanding webpage screenshots and generating their corresponding HTML code. To address this problem, we propose Web2Code, a benchmark consisting of a new large-scale webpage-to-code dataset for instruction tuning and an evaluation framework for the webpage understanding and HTML code translation abilities of MLLMs. For dataset construction, we leverage pretrained LLMs to enhance existing webpage-to-code datasets as well as generate a diverse pool of new webpages rendered into images. Specifically, the inputs are webpage images and instructions, while the responses are the webpage's HTML code. We further include diverse natural language QA pairs about the webpage content in the responses to enable a more comprehensive understanding of the web content. To evaluate model performance in these tasks, we develop an evaluation framework for testing MLLMs' abilities in webpage understanding and web-to-code generation. Extensive experiments show that our proposed dataset is beneficial not only to our proposed tasks but also in the general visual domain, while previous datasets result in worse performance. We hope our work will contribute to the development of general MLLMs suitable for web-based content generation and task automation. Our data and code will be available at https://github.com/MBZUAI-LLM/web2code.

In the evolving landscape of large language models (LLMs) tailored for software engineering, the need for benchmarks that accurately reflect real-world development scenarios is paramount. Current benchmarks are either too simplistic or fail to capture the multi-tasking nature of software development. To address this, we introduce CoderUJB, a new benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs across diverse Java programming tasks that are executable and reflective of actual development scenarios, acknowledging Java's prevalence in real-world software production. CoderUJB comprises 2,239 programming questions derived from 17 real open-source Java projects and spans five practical programming tasks. Our empirical study on this benchmark investigates the coding abilities of various open-source and closed-source LLMs, examining the effects of continued pre-training in specific programming languages code and instruction fine-tuning on their performance. The findings indicate that while LLMs exhibit strong potential, challenges remain, particularly in non-functional code generation (e.g., test generation and defect detection). Importantly, our results advise caution in the specific programming languages continued pre-training and instruction fine-tuning, as these techniques could hinder model performance on certain tasks, suggesting the need for more nuanced strategies. CoderUJB thus marks a significant step towards more realistic evaluations of programming capabilities in LLMs, and our study provides valuable insights for the future development of these models in software engineering.

Recent research explores optimization using large language models (LLMs) by either iteratively seeking next-step solutions from LLMs or directly prompting LLMs for an optimizer. However, these approaches exhibit inherent limitations, including low operational efficiency, high sensitivity to prompt design, and a lack of domain-specific knowledge. We introduce LLaMoCo, the first instruction-tuning framework designed to adapt LLMs for solving optimization problems in a code-to-code manner. Specifically, we establish a comprehensive instruction set containing well-described problem prompts and effective optimization codes. We then develop a novel two-phase learning strategy that incorporates a contrastive learning-based warm-up procedure before the instruction-tuning phase to enhance the convergence behavior during model fine-tuning. The experiment results demonstrate that a CodeGen (350M) model fine-tuned by our LLaMoCo achieves superior optimization performance compared to GPT-4 Turbo and the other competitors across both synthetic and realistic problem sets. The fine-tuned model and the usage instructions are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/LLaMoCo-722A.

Instruction tuning large language model (LLM) on image-text pairs has achieved unprecedented vision-language multimodal abilities. However, their vision-language alignments are only built on image-level, the lack of region-level alignment limits their advancements to fine-grained multimodal understanding. In this paper, we propose instruction tuning on region-of-interest. The key design is to reformulate the bounding box as the format of spatial instruction. The interleaved sequences of visual features extracted by the spatial instruction and the language embedding are input to LLM, and trained on the transformed region-text data in instruction tuning format. Our region-level vision-language model, termed as GPT4RoI, brings brand new conversational and interactive experience beyond image-level understanding. (1) Controllability: Users can interact with our model by both language and spatial instructions to flexibly adjust the detail level of the question. (2) Capacities: Our model supports not only single-region spatial instruction but also multi-region. This unlocks more region-level multimodal capacities such as detailed region caption and complex region reasoning. (3) Composition: Any off-the-shelf object detector can be a spatial instruction provider so as to mine informative object attributes from our model, like color, shape, material, action, relation to other objects, etc. The code, data, and demo can be found at https://github.com/jshilong/GPT4RoI.

Instruction tuning of open-source large language models (LLMs) like LLaMA, using direct outputs from more powerful LLMs such as Instruct-GPT and GPT-4, has proven to be a cost-effective way to align model behaviors with human preferences. However, the instruction-tuned model has only seen one response per instruction, lacking the knowledge of potentially better responses. In this paper, we propose finetuning an instruction-tuned LLM using our novel probabilistic ranking and contextual ranking approaches to increase the likelihood of generating better responses. Probabilistic ranking enables the instruction-tuned model to inherit the relative rankings of high-quality and low-quality responses from the teacher LLM. On the other hand, learning with contextual ranking allows the model to refine its own response distribution using the contextual understanding ability of stronger LLMs. Furthermore, we apply probabilistic ranking and contextual ranking sequentially to the instruction-tuned LLM. The resulting model, which we call Tuna, consistently improves the performance on Super Natural Instructions (119 test tasks), LMentry (25 test tasks), Vicuna QA, and can even obtain better results than several strong reinforcement learning baselines. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/microsoft/LMOps.

We introduce Lavender, a simple supervised fine-tuning (SFT) method that boosts the performance of advanced vision-language models (VLMs) by leveraging state-of-the-art image generation models such as Stable Diffusion. Specifically, Lavender aligns the text-vision attention in the VLM transformer with the equivalent used by Stable Diffusion during SFT, instead of adapting separate encoders. This alignment enriches the model's visual understanding and significantly boosts performance across in- and out-of-distribution tasks. Lavender requires just 0.13 million training examples, 2.5% of typical large-scale SFT datasets, and fine-tunes on standard hardware (8 GPUs) in a single day. It consistently improves state-of-the-art open-source multimodal LLMs (e.g., Llama-3.2-11B, MiniCPM-Llama3-v2.5), achieving up to 30% gains and a 68% boost on challenging out-of-distribution medical QA tasks. By efficiently transferring the visual expertise of image generators with minimal supervision, Lavender offers a scalable solution for more accurate vision-language systems. All code, training data, and models will be shared at https://astrazeneca.github.io/vlm/.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated human-like instruction-following abilities, particularly those exceeding 100 billion parameters. The combined capability of some smaller, resource-friendly LLMs can address most of the instructions that larger LLMs excel at. In this work, we explore how to route the best-performing LLM for each instruction to achieve better overall performance. We develop a new paradigm, constructing capability instructions with model capability representation, user instruction, and performance inquiry prompts to assess the performance. To learn from capability instructions, we introduce a new end-to-end framework called Model Selection with Aptitude Test (Model-SAT), which generates positive and negative samples based on what different models perform well or struggle with. Model-SAT uses a model capability encoder that extends its model representation to a lightweight LLM. Our experiments show that Model-SAT understands the performance dimensions of candidate models and provides the probabilities of their capability to handle various instructions. Additionally, during deployment, a new model can quickly infer its aptitude test results across 50 tasks, each with 20 shots. Model-SAT performs state-of-the-art model routing without candidate inference and in real-world new model-released scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/Now-Join-Us/CIT-LLM-Routing

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities across various language tasks, notably through instruction-tuning methods. However, LLMs face challenges in visualizing complex, real-world data through charts and plots. Firstly, existing datasets rarely cover a full range of chart types, such as 3D, volumetric, and gridded charts. Secondly, supervised fine-tuning methods do not fully leverage the intricate relationships within rich datasets, including text, code, and figures. To address these challenges, we propose a hierarchical pipeline and a new dataset for chart generation. Our dataset, Text2Chart31, includes 31 unique plot types referring to the Matplotlib library, with 11.1K tuples of descriptions, code, data tables, and plots. Moreover, we introduce a reinforcement learning-based instruction tuning technique for chart generation tasks without requiring human feedback. Our experiments show that this approach significantly enhances the model performance, enabling smaller models to outperform larger open-source models and be comparable to state-of-the-art proprietary models in data visualization tasks. We make the code and dataset available at https://github.com/fatemehpesaran310/Text2Chart31.

The strong capability of large language models (LLMs) has been applied to information extraction (IE) through either retrieval augmented prompting or instruction tuning (IT). However, the best way to incorporate information with LLMs for IE remains an open question. In this paper, we explore Retrieval Augmented Instruction Tuning (RA-IT) for IE, focusing on the task of open named entity recognition (NER). Specifically, for each training sample, we retrieve semantically similar examples from the training dataset as the context and prepend them to the input of the original instruction. To evaluate our RA-IT approach more thoroughly, we construct a Chinese IT dataset for open NER and evaluate RA-IT in both English and Chinese scenarios. Experimental results verify the effectiveness of RA-IT across various data sizes and in both English and Chinese scenarios. We also conduct thorough studies to explore the impacts of various retrieval strategies in the proposed RA-IT framework. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/Emma1066/Retrieval-Augmented-IT-OpenNER

Recent studies have shown that maintaining a consistent response style by human experts and enhancing data quality in training sets can significantly improve the performance of fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) while reducing the number of training examples needed. However, the precise definition of style and the relationship between style, data quality, and LLM performance remains unclear. This research decomposes response style into presentation and composition styles and finds that, among training data of similar quality, those with higher style consistency lead to better LLM performance. Inspired by this, we introduce Style Consistency-Aware Response Ranking (SCAR), which automatically prioritizes instruction-response pairs in the training set based on their response stylistic consistency. By selecting the most style-consistent examples, ranging from the top 25% to 0.7% of the full dataset, the fine-tuned LLMs can match or even surpass the performance of models trained on the entire dataset in coding and open-ended question-answering benchmarks. Code and data are available at https://github.com/zhuang-li/SCAR .

Instruction tuning is an essential supervised training phase for Large Language Models (LLMs), with the goal of enhancing LLMs' capacity to generalize instruction execution and adapt to user preferences. With the growing incorporation of multi-modal data into LLMs, there is an increasing interest in the performance of vision-language instruction tuning which presents more complex features in comparison to pure text instructions. In this paper, we systematically review the latest vision-language instruction tuning settings and datasets in multi-modal LLMs and summarize the characteristics that high-quality vision-language tuning data should have. We consider these characteristics as the foundational principles for constructing vision-language instruction data and propose a complete construction pipeline consisting of data collection, instruction generation, and quality control modules that incorporate meticulously designed instruction property evaluation indicators. We perform vision-language instruction tuning on three widely used multi-modal LLMs based on the instruction data we constructed and conduct extensive experiments on the corresponding metrics to demonstrate the rationality of the construction principles proposed in this paper. The code and dataset related to this paper have been open-sourced at https://github.com/palchenli/VL-Instruction-Tuning.

Federated Domain-specific Instruction Tuning (FedDIT) utilizes limited cross-client private data together with server-side public data for instruction augmentation, ultimately boosting model performance within specific domains. To date, the factors affecting FedDIT remain unclear, and existing instruction augmentation methods primarily focus on the centralized setting without considering distributed environments. Our experiments reveal that the cross-client domain coverage, rather than data heterogeneity, drives model performance in FedDIT. In response, we propose FedDCA, which optimizes domain coverage through greedy client center selection and retrieval-based augmentation. For client-side computational efficiency and system scalability, FedDCA^*, the variant of FedDCA, utilizes heterogeneous encoders with server-side feature alignment. Extensive experiments across four distinct domains (code, medical, financial, and mathematical) substantiate the effectiveness of both methods. Additionally, we investigate privacy preservation against memory extraction attacks utilizing various amounts of public data. Results show that there is no significant correlation between the volume of public data and the privacy-preserving capability. However, as the fine-tuning rounds increase, the risk of privacy leakage reduces or converges.

Large multimodal models (LMM) have recently shown encouraging progress with visual instruction tuning. In this note, we show that the fully-connected vision-language cross-modal connector in LLaVA is surprisingly powerful and data-efficient. With simple modifications to LLaVA, namely, using CLIP-ViT-L-336px with an MLP projection and adding academic-task-oriented VQA data with simple response formatting prompts, we establish stronger baselines that achieve state-of-the-art across 11 benchmarks. Our final 13B checkpoint uses merely 1.2M publicly available data, and finishes full training in ~1 day on a single 8-A100 node. We hope this can make state-of-the-art LMM research more accessible. Code and model will be publicly available.

Given the ubiquity of charts as a data analysis, visualization, and decision-making tool across industries and sciences, there has been a growing interest in developing pre-trained foundation models as well as general purpose instruction-tuned models for chart understanding and reasoning. However, existing methods suffer crucial drawbacks across two critical axes affecting the performance of chart representation models: they are trained on data generated from underlying data tables of the charts, ignoring the visual trends and patterns in chart images, and use weakly aligned vision-language backbone models for domain-specific training, limiting their generalizability when encountering charts in the wild. We address these important drawbacks and introduce ChartGemma, a novel chart understanding and reasoning model developed over PaliGemma. Rather than relying on underlying data tables, ChartGemma is trained on instruction-tuning data generated directly from chart images, thus capturing both high-level trends and low-level visual information from a diverse set of charts. Our simple approach achieves state-of-the-art results across 5 benchmarks spanning chart summarization, question answering, and fact-checking, and our elaborate qualitative studies on real-world charts show that ChartGemma generates more realistic and factually correct summaries compared to its contemporaries. We release the code, model checkpoints, dataset, and demos at https://github.com/vis-nlp/ChartGemma.

We present ImageBind-LLM, a multi-modality instruction tuning method of large language models (LLMs) via ImageBind. Existing works mainly focus on language and image instruction tuning, different from which, our ImageBind-LLM can respond to multi-modality conditions, including audio, 3D point clouds, video, and their embedding-space arithmetic by only image-text alignment training. During training, we adopt a learnable bind network to align the embedding space between LLaMA and ImageBind's image encoder. Then, the image features transformed by the bind network are added to word tokens of all layers in LLaMA, which progressively injects visual instructions via an attention-free and zero-initialized gating mechanism. Aided by the joint embedding of ImageBind, the simple image-text training enables our model to exhibit superior multi-modality instruction-following capabilities. During inference, the multi-modality inputs are fed into the corresponding ImageBind encoders, and processed by a proposed visual cache model for further cross-modal embedding enhancement. The training-free cache model retrieves from three million image features extracted by ImageBind, which effectively mitigates the training-inference modality discrepancy. Notably, with our approach, ImageBind-LLM can respond to instructions of diverse modalities and demonstrate significant language generation quality. Code is released at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/LLaMA-Adapter.

Instruction tuning is an effective technique to align large language models (LLMs) with human intents. In this work, we investigate how an adversary can exploit instruction tuning by injecting specific instruction-following examples into the training data that intentionally changes the model's behavior. For example, an adversary can achieve content injection by injecting training examples that mention target content and eliciting such behavior from downstream models. To achieve this goal, we propose AutoPoison, an automated data poisoning pipeline. It naturally and coherently incorporates versatile attack goals into poisoned data with the help of an oracle LLM. We showcase two example attacks: content injection and over-refusal attacks, each aiming to induce a specific exploitable behavior. We quantify and benchmark the strength and the stealthiness of our data poisoning scheme. Our results show that AutoPoison allows an adversary to change a model's behavior by poisoning only a small fraction of data while maintaining a high level of stealthiness in the poisoned examples. We hope our work sheds light on how data quality affects the behavior of instruction-tuned models and raises awareness of the importance of data quality for responsible deployments of LLMs. Code is available at https://github.com/azshue/AutoPoison.

Recently, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) that enable Large Language Models (LLMs) to interpret images through visual instruction tuning have achieved significant success. However, existing visual instruction tuning methods only utilize image-language instruction data to align the language and image modalities, lacking a more fine-grained cross-modal alignment. In this paper, we propose Position-enhanced Visual Instruction Tuning (PVIT), which extends the functionality of MLLMs by integrating an additional region-level vision encoder. This integration promotes a more detailed comprehension of images for the MLLM. In addition, to efficiently achieve a fine-grained alignment between the vision modules and the LLM, we design multiple data generation strategies to construct an image-region-language instruction dataset. Finally, we present both quantitative experiments and qualitative analysis that demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model. Code and data will be released at https://github.com/THUNLP-MT/PVIT.

We present Code Comparison Tuning (CCT), a simple and effective tuning method for code large language models (Code LLMs) to better handle subtle code errors. Specifically, we integrate the concept of comparison into instruction tuning, both at the token and sequence levels, enabling the model to discern even the slightest deviations in code. To compare the original code with an erroneous version containing manually added code errors, we use token-level preference loss for detailed token-level comparisons. Additionally, we combine code segments to create a new instruction tuning sample for sequence-level comparisons, enhancing the model's bug-fixing capability. Experimental results on the HumanEvalFix benchmark show that CCT surpasses instruction tuning in pass@1 scores by up to 4 points across diverse code LLMs, and extensive analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of our method.

Large language models with instruction-following capabilities open the door to a wider group of users. However, when it comes to information extraction - a classic task in natural language processing - most task-specific systems cannot align well with long-tail ad hoc extraction use cases for non-expert users. To address this, we propose a novel paradigm, termed On-Demand Information Extraction, to fulfill the personalized demands of real-world users. Our task aims to follow the instructions to extract the desired content from the associated text and present it in a structured tabular format. The table headers can either be user-specified or inferred contextually by the model. To facilitate research in this emerging area, we present a benchmark named InstructIE, inclusive of both automatically generated training data, as well as the human-annotated test set. Building on InstructIE, we further develop an On-Demand Information Extractor, ODIE. Comprehensive evaluations on our benchmark reveal that ODIE substantially outperforms the existing open-source models of similar size. Our code and dataset are released on https://github.com/yzjiao/On-Demand-IE.

The remarkable potential of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) in comprehending both vision and language information has been widely acknowledged. However, the scarcity of 3D scenes-language pairs in comparison to their 2D counterparts, coupled with the inadequacy of existing approaches in understanding of 3D scenes by LLMs, poses a significant challenge. In response, we collect and construct an extensive dataset comprising 75K instruction-response pairs tailored for 3D scenes. This dataset addresses tasks related to 3D VQA, 3D grounding, and 3D conversation. To further enhance the integration of 3D spatial information into LLMs, we introduce a novel and efficient prompt tuning paradigm, 3DMIT. This paradigm eliminates the alignment stage between 3D scenes and language and extends the instruction prompt with the 3D modality information including the entire scene and segmented objects. We evaluate the effectiveness of our method across diverse tasks in the 3D scene domain and find that our approach serves as a strategic means to enrich LLMs' comprehension of the 3D world. Our code is available at https://github.com/staymylove/3DMIT.

The gigapixel scale of whole slide images (WSIs) poses a challenge for histopathology multi-modal chatbots, requiring a global WSI analysis for diagnosis, compounding evidence from different WSI patches. Current visual instruction datasets, generated through large language models, focus on creating question/answer pairs for individual image patches, which may lack diagnostic capacity on their own in histopathology, further complicated by the absence of spatial grounding in histopathology image captions. To bridge this gap, we introduce Quilt-Instruct, a large-scale dataset of 107,131 histopathology-specific instruction question/answer pairs, that is collected by leveraging educational histopathology videos from YouTube, which provides spatial localization of captions by automatically extracting narrators' cursor movements. In addition, we provide contextual reasoning by extracting diagnosis and supporting facts from the entire video content to guide the extrapolative reasoning of GPT-4. Using Quilt-Instruct, we train Quilt-LLaVA, which can reason beyond the given single image patch, enabling diagnostic reasoning and the capability of spatial awareness. To evaluate Quilt-LLaVA, we propose a comprehensive evaluation dataset created from 985 images and 1283 human-generated question-answers. We also thoroughly evaluate Quilt-LLaVA using public histopathology datasets, where Quilt-LLaVA significantly outperforms SOTA by over 10% on relative GPT-4 score and 4% and 9% on open and closed set VQA. Our code, data, and model are publicly available at quilt-llava.github.io.

Recent large language models (LLMs) have revealed strong abilities to understand natural language. Since most of them share the same basic structure, i.e. the transformer block, possible contributors to their success in the training process are scaling and instruction tuning. However, how these factors affect the models' language perception is unclear. This work compares the self-attention of several existing LLMs (LLaMA, Alpaca and Vicuna) in different sizes (7B, 13B, 30B, 65B), together with eye saccade, an aspect of human reading attention, to assess the effect of scaling and instruction tuning on language perception. Results show that scaling enhances the human resemblance and improves the effective attention by reducing the trivial pattern reliance, while instruction tuning does not. However, instruction tuning significantly enhances the models' sensitivity to instructions. We also find that current LLMs are consistently closer to non-native than native speakers in attention, suggesting a sub-optimal language perception of all models. Our code and data used in the analysis is available on GitHub.

All text-based language problems can be reduced to either generation or embedding. Current models only perform well at one or the other. We introduce generative representational instruction tuning (GRIT) whereby a large language model is trained to handle both generative and embedding tasks by distinguishing between them through instructions. Compared to other open models, our resulting GritLM 7B sets a new state of the art on the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB) and outperforms all models up to its size on a range of generative tasks. By scaling up further, GritLM 8x7B outperforms all open generative language models that we tried while still being among the best embedding models. Notably, we find that GRIT matches training on only generative or embedding data, thus we can unify both at no performance loss. Among other benefits, the unification via GRIT speeds up Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) by > 60% for long documents, by no longer requiring separate retrieval and generation models. Models, code, etc. are freely available at https://github.com/ContextualAI/gritlm.

The rapid development of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) like GPT-4V has marked a significant step towards artificial general intelligence. Existing methods mainly focus on aligning vision encoders with LLMs through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to endow LLMs with multimodal abilities, making MLLMs' inherent ability to react to multiple languages progressively deteriorate as the training process evolves. We empirically find that the imbalanced SFT datasets, primarily composed of English-centric image-text pairs, lead to significantly reduced performance in non-English languages. This is due to the failure of aligning the vision encoder and LLM with multilingual tokens during the SFT process. In this paper, we introduce Parrot, a novel method that utilizes textual guidance to drive visual token alignment at the language level. Parrot makes the visual tokens condition on diverse language inputs and uses Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) to promote the alignment of multilingual tokens. Specifically, to enhance non-English visual tokens alignment, we compute the cross-attention using the initial visual features and textual embeddings, the result of which is then fed into the MoE router to select the most relevant experts. The selected experts subsequently convert the initial visual tokens into language-specific visual tokens. Moreover, considering the current lack of benchmarks for evaluating multilingual capabilities within the field, we collect and make available a Massive Multilingual Multimodal Benchmark which includes 6 languages, 15 categories, and 12,000 questions, named as MMMB. Our method not only demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on multilingual MMBench and MMMB, but also excels across a broad range of multimodal tasks. Both the source code and the training dataset of Parrot will be made publicly available.

Instruction tuning large language models (LLMs) using machine-generated instruction-following data has improved zero-shot capabilities on new tasks, but the idea is less explored in the multimodal field. In this paper, we present the first attempt to use language-only GPT-4 to generate multimodal language-image instruction-following data. By instruction tuning on such generated data, we introduce LLaVA: Large Language and Vision Assistant, an end-to-end trained large multimodal model that connects a vision encoder and LLM for general-purpose visual and language understanding.Our early experiments show that LLaVA demonstrates impressive multimodel chat abilities, sometimes exhibiting the behaviors of multimodal GPT-4 on unseen images/instructions, and yields a 85.1% relative score compared with GPT-4 on a synthetic multimodal instruction-following dataset. When fine-tuned on Science QA, the synergy of LLaVA and GPT-4 achieves a new state-of-the-art accuracy of 92.53%. We make GPT-4 generated visual instruction tuning data, our model and code base publicly available.

Selecting high-quality training data from a larger pool is a crucial step when instruction-tuning language models, as carefully curated datasets often produce models that outperform those trained on much larger, noisier datasets. Automated data selection approaches for instruction-tuning are typically tested by selecting small datasets (roughly 10k samples) from small pools (100-200k samples). However, popular deployed instruction-tuned models often train on hundreds of thousands to millions of samples, subsampled from even larger data pools. We present a systematic study of how well data selection methods scale to these settings, selecting up to 2.5M samples from pools of up to 5.8M samples and evaluating across 7 diverse tasks. We show that many recently proposed methods fall short of random selection in this setting (while using more compute), and even decline in performance when given access to larger pools of data to select over. However, we find that a variant of representation-based data selection (RDS+), which uses weighted mean pooling of pretrained LM hidden states, consistently outperforms more complex methods across all settings tested -- all whilst being more compute-efficient. Our findings highlight that the scaling properties of proposed automated selection methods should be more closely examined. We release our code, data, and models at https://github.com/hamishivi/automated-instruction-selection.

Instruction tuning unlocks the superior capability of Large Language Models (LLM) to interact with humans. Furthermore, recent instruction-following datasets include images as visual inputs, collecting responses for image-based instructions. However, visual instruction-tuned models cannot comprehend textual details within images well. This work enhances the current visual instruction tuning pipeline with text-rich images (e.g., movie posters, book covers, etc.). Specifically, we first use publicly available OCR tools to collect results on 422K text-rich images from the LAION dataset. Moreover, we prompt text-only GPT-4 with recognized texts and image captions to generate 16K conversations, each containing question-answer pairs for text-rich images. By combining our collected data with previous multi-modal instruction-following data, our model, LLaVAR, substantially improves the LLaVA model's capability on text-based VQA datasets (up to 20% accuracy improvement) while achieving an accuracy of 91.42% on ScienceQA. The GPT-4-based instruction-following evaluation also demonstrates the improvement of our model on both natural images and text-rich images. Through qualitative analysis, LLaVAR shows promising interaction (e.g., reasoning, writing, and elaboration) skills with humans based on the latest real-world online content that combines text and images. We make our code/data/models publicly available at https://llavar.github.io/.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have recently achieved impressive general-purpose vision-language capabilities through visual instruction tuning. However, current MLLMs primarily focus on image-level or box-level understanding, falling short of achieving fine-grained vision-language alignment at the pixel level. Besides, the lack of mask-based instruction data limits their advancements. In this paper, we propose Osprey, a mask-text instruction tuning approach, to extend MLLMs by incorporating fine-grained mask regions into language instruction, aiming at achieving pixel-wise visual understanding. To achieve this goal, we first meticulously curate a mask-based region-text dataset with 724K samples, and then design a vision-language model by injecting pixel-level representation into LLM. Especially, Osprey adopts a convolutional CLIP backbone as the vision encoder and employs a mask-aware visual extractor to extract precise visual mask features from high resolution input. Experimental results demonstrate Osprey's superiority in various region understanding tasks, showcasing its new capability for pixel-level instruction tuning. In particular, Osprey can be integrated with Segment Anything Model (SAM) seamlessly to obtain multi-granularity semantics. The source code, dataset and demo can be found at https://github.com/CircleRadon/Osprey.

Instruction tuning (IT) is crucial to tailoring large language models (LLMs) towards human-centric interactions. Recent advancements have shown that the careful selection of a small, high-quality subset of IT data can significantly enhance the performance of LLMs. Despite this, common approaches often rely on additional models or data sets, which increases costs and limits widespread adoption. In this work, we propose a novel approach, termed SelectIT, that capitalizes on the foundational capabilities of the LLM itself. Specifically, we exploit the intrinsic uncertainty present in LLMs to more effectively select high-quality IT data, without the need for extra resources. Furthermore, we introduce a novel IT dataset, the Selective Alpaca, created by applying SelectIT to the Alpaca-GPT4 dataset. Empirical results demonstrate that IT using Selective Alpaca leads to substantial model ability enhancement. The robustness of SelectIT has also been corroborated in various foundation models and domain-specific tasks. Our findings suggest that longer and more computationally intensive IT data may serve as superior sources of IT, offering valuable insights for future research in this area. Data, code, and scripts are freely available at https://github.com/Blue-Raincoat/SelectIT.

Instruction tuning is crucial for enabling Language Learning Models (LLMs) in responding to human instructions. The quality of instruction pairs used for tuning greatly affects the performance of LLMs. However, the manual creation of high-quality instruction datasets is costly, leading to the adoption of automatic generation of instruction pairs by LLMs as a popular alternative in the training of open-source LLMs. To ensure the high quality of LLM-generated instruction datasets, several approaches have been proposed. Nevertheless, existing methods either compromise dataset integrity by filtering a large proportion of samples, or are unsuitable for industrial applications. In this paper, instead of discarding low-quality samples, we propose CoachLM, a novel approach to enhance the quality of instruction datasets through automatic revisions on samples in the dataset. CoachLM is trained from the samples revised by human experts and significantly increases the proportion of high-quality samples in the dataset from 17.7% to 78.9%. The effectiveness of CoachLM is further assessed on various real-world instruction test sets. The results show that CoachLM improves the instruction-following capabilities of the instruction-tuned LLM by an average of 29.9%, which even surpasses larger LLMs with nearly twice the number of parameters. Furthermore, CoachLM is successfully deployed in a data management system for LLMs at Huawei, resulting in an efficiency improvement of up to 20% in the cleaning of 40k real-world instruction pairs. We release the training data and code of CoachLM (https://github.com/lunyiliu/CoachLM).

Instruction tuning has emerged to enhance the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to comprehend instructions and generate appropriate responses. Existing methods either manually annotate or employ LLM (e.g., GPT-series) to generate data for instruction tuning. However, they often overlook associating instructions with existing annotated datasets. In this paper, we propose Dynosaur, a dynamic growth paradigm for the automatic curation of instruction-tuning data. Based on the metadata of existing datasets, we use LLMs to automatically construct instruction-tuning data by identifying relevant data fields and generating appropriate instructions. By leveraging the existing annotated datasets, Dynosaur offers several advantages: 1) it reduces the API cost for generating instructions (e.g., it costs less than $12 USD by calling GPT-3.5-turbo for generating 800K instruction tuning samples; 2) it provides high-quality data for instruction tuning (e.g., it performs better than Alpaca and Flan on Super-NI and Longform with comparable data sizes); and 3) it supports the continuous improvement of models by generating instruction-tuning data when a new annotated dataset becomes available. We further investigate a continual learning scheme for learning with the ever-growing instruction-tuning dataset, and demonstrate that replaying tasks with diverse instruction embeddings not only helps mitigate forgetting issues but generalizes to unseen tasks better. Code and data are available at https://github.com/WadeYin9712/Dynosaur.

Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have made significant strides in various visual understanding tasks. However, the majority of these models are constrained to process low-resolution images, which limits their effectiveness in perception tasks that necessitate detailed visual information. In our study, we present MG-LLaVA, an innovative MLLM that enhances the model's visual processing capabilities by incorporating a multi-granularity vision flow, which includes low-resolution, high-resolution, and object-centric features. We propose the integration of an additional high-resolution visual encoder to capture fine-grained details, which are then fused with base visual features through a Conv-Gate fusion network. To further refine the model's object recognition abilities, we incorporate object-level features derived from bounding boxes identified by offline detectors. Being trained solely on publicly available multimodal data through instruction tuning, MG-LLaVA demonstrates exceptional perception skills. We instantiate MG-LLaVA with a wide variety of language encoders, ranging from 3.8B to 34B, to evaluate the model's performance comprehensively. Extensive evaluations across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that MG-LLaVA outperforms existing MLLMs of comparable parameter sizes, showcasing its remarkable efficacy. The code will be available at https://github.com/PhoenixZ810/MG-LLaVA.

Recent advancements in Chain-of-Thoughts (CoT) and Program-of-Thoughts (PoT) methods have greatly enhanced language models' mathematical reasoning capabilities, facilitating their integration into instruction tuning datasets with LLMs. However, existing methods for large-scale dataset creation require substantial seed data and high computational costs for data synthesis, posing significant challenges for scalability. We introduce InfinityMATH, a scalable instruction tuning dataset for programmatic mathematical reasoning. The construction pipeline emphasizes decoupling numbers from mathematical problems to synthesize number-independent programs, enabling efficient and flexible scaling while minimizing dependency on specific numerical values. Fine-tuning experiments with open-source language and code models, such as Llama2 and CodeLlama, demonstrate the practical benefits of InfinityMATH. These fine-tuned models, showed significant relative improvements on both in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks, ranging from 184.7% to 514.3% on average. Additionally, these models exhibited high robustness on the GSM8K+ and MATH+ benchmarks, which are enhanced version of test sets with simply the number variations. InfinityMATH ensures that models are more versatile and effective across a broader range of mathematical problems. The data is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/flagopen/InfinityMATH.

Text editing or revision is an essential function of the human writing process. Understanding the capabilities of LLMs for making high-quality revisions and collaborating with human writers is a critical step toward building effective writing assistants. With the prior success of LLMs and instruction tuning, we leverage instruction-tuned LLMs for text revision to improve the quality of user-generated text and improve the efficiency of the process. We introduce CoEdIT, a state-of-the-art text editing model for writing assistance. CoEdIT takes instructions from the user specifying the attributes of the desired text, such as "Make the sentence simpler" or "Write it in a more neutral style," and outputs the edited text. We present a large language model fine-tuned on a diverse collection of task-specific instructions for text editing (a total of 82K instructions). Our model (1) achieves state-of-the-art performance on various text editing benchmarks, (2) is competitive with publicly available largest-sized LLMs trained on instructions while being sim60x smaller, (3) is capable of generalizing to unseen edit instructions, and (4) exhibits compositional comprehension abilities to generalize to instructions containing different combinations of edit actions. Through extensive qualitative and quantitative analysis, we show that writers prefer the edits suggested by CoEdIT, relative to other state-of-the-art text editing models. Our code and dataset are publicly available.

Despite the effectiveness of vision-language supervised fine-tuning in enhancing the performance of Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs). However, existing visual instruction tuning datasets include the following limitations: (1) Instruction annotation quality: despite existing VLLMs exhibiting strong performance, instructions generated by those advanced VLLMs may still suffer from inaccuracies, such as hallucinations. (2) Instructions and image diversity: the limited range of instruction types and the lack of diversity in image data may impact the model's ability to generate diversified and closer to real-world scenarios outputs. To address these challenges, we construct a high-quality, diverse visual instruction tuning dataset MMInstruct, which consists of 973K instructions from 24 domains. There are four instruction types: Judgement, Multiple-Choice, Long Visual Question Answering and Short Visual Question Answering. To construct MMInstruct, we propose an instruction generation data engine that leverages GPT-4V, GPT-3.5, and manual correction. Our instruction generation engine enables semi-automatic, low-cost, and multi-domain instruction generation at 1/6 the cost of manual construction. Through extensive experiment validation and ablation experiments, we demonstrate that MMInstruct could significantly improve the performance of VLLMs, e.g., the model fine-tuning on MMInstruct achieves new state-of-the-art performance on 10 out of 12 benchmarks. The code and data shall be available at https://github.com/yuecao0119/MMInstruct.

Multimodal information extraction (MIE) gains significant attention as the popularity of multimedia content increases. However, current MIE methods often resort to using task-specific model structures, which results in limited generalizability across tasks and underutilizes shared knowledge across MIE tasks. To address these issues, we propose UMIE, a unified multimodal information extractor to unify three MIE tasks as a generation problem using instruction tuning, being able to effectively extract both textual and visual mentions. Extensive experiments show that our single UMIE outperforms various state-of-the-art (SoTA) methods across six MIE datasets on three tasks. Furthermore, in-depth analysis demonstrates UMIE's strong generalization in the zero-shot setting, robustness to instruction variants, and interpretability. Our research serves as an initial step towards a unified MIE model and initiates the exploration into both instruction tuning and large language models within the MIE domain. Our code, data, and model are available at https://github.com/ZUCC-AI/UMIE

This paper describes the architecture of our system developed for Task 3 of SemEval-2024: Multimodal Emotion-Cause Analysis in Conversations. Our project targets the challenges of subtask 2, dedicated to Multimodal Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction with Emotion Category (MECPE-Cat), and constructs a dual-component system tailored to the unique challenges of this task. We divide the task into two subtasks: emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) and emotion-cause pair extraction (ECPE). To address these subtasks, we capitalize on the abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), which have consistently demonstrated state-of-the-art performance across various natural language processing tasks and domains. Most importantly, we design an approach of emotion-cause-aware instruction-tuning for LLMs, to enhance the perception of the emotions with their corresponding causal rationales. Our method enables us to adeptly navigate the complexities of MECPE-Cat, achieving a weighted average 34.71% F1 score of the task, and securing the 2nd rank on the leaderboard. The code and metadata to reproduce our experiments are all made publicly available.

Visual instruction tuning is the key to building multimodal large language models (MLLMs), which greatly improves the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in vision scenario. However, existing MLLMs mostly rely on a mixture of multiple highly diverse visual instruction datasets for training (even more than a million instructions), which may introduce data redundancy. To investigate this issue, we conduct a series of empirical studies, which reveal a significant redundancy within the visual instruction datasets, and show that greatly reducing the amount of several instruction dataset even do not affect the performance. Based on the findings, we propose a new data selection approach TIVE, to eliminate redundancy within visual instruction data. TIVE first estimates the task-level and instance-level value of the visual instructions based on computed gradients. Then, according to the estimated values, TIVE determines the task proportion within the visual instructions, and selects representative instances to compose a smaller visual instruction subset for training. Experiments on LLaVA-1.5 show that our approach using only about 7.5% data can achieve comparable performance as the full-data fine-tuned model across seven benchmarks, even surpassing it on four of the benchmarks. Our code and data will be publicly released.

Instruction Tuning involves finetuning a language model on a collection of instruction-formatted datasets in order to enhance the generalizability of the model to unseen tasks. Studies have shown the importance of balancing different task proportions during finetuning, but finding the right balance remains challenging. Unfortunately, there's currently no systematic method beyond manual tuning or relying on practitioners' intuition. In this paper, we introduce SMART (Submodular data Mixture strAtegy for instRuction Tuning) - a novel data mixture strategy which makes use of a submodular function to assign importance scores to tasks which are then used to determine the mixture weights. Given a fine-tuning budget, SMART redistributes the budget among tasks and selects non-redundant samples from each task. Experimental results demonstrate that SMART significantly outperforms traditional methods such as examples proportional mixing and equal mixing. Furthermore, SMART facilitates the creation of data mixtures based on a few representative subsets of tasks alone and through task pruning analysis, we reveal that in a limited budget setting, allocating budget among a subset of representative tasks yields superior performance compared to distributing the budget among all tasks. The code for reproducing our results is open-sourced at https://github.com/kowndinya-renduchintala/SMART.

Enhancing the instruction-following ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) primarily demands substantial instruction-tuning datasets. However, the sheer volume of these imposes a considerable computational burden and annotation cost. To investigate a label-efficient instruction tuning method that allows the model itself to actively sample subsets that are equally or even more effective, we introduce a self-evolving mechanism DiverseEvol. In this process, a model iteratively augments its training subset to refine its own performance, without requiring any intervention from humans or more advanced LLMs. The key to our data sampling technique lies in the enhancement of diversity in the chosen subsets, as the model selects new data points most distinct from any existing ones according to its current embedding space. Extensive experiments across three datasets and benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of DiverseEvol. Our models, trained on less than 8% of the original dataset, maintain or improve performance compared with finetuning on full data. We also provide empirical evidence to analyze the importance of diversity in instruction data and the iterative scheme as opposed to one-time sampling. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/OFA-Sys/DiverseEvol.git.

Recent work demonstrates that, after being fine-tuned on a high-quality instruction dataset, the resulting model can obtain impressive capabilities to address a wide range of tasks. However, existing methods for instruction data generation often produce duplicate data and are not controllable enough on data quality. In this paper, we extend the generalization of instruction tuning by classifying the instruction data to 4 code-related tasks and propose a LLM-based Generator-Discriminator data process framework to generate diverse, high-quality instruction data from open source code. Hence, we introduce CodeOcean, a dataset comprising 20,000 instruction instances across 4 universal code-related tasks,which is aimed at augmenting the effectiveness of instruction tuning and improving the generalization ability of fine-tuned model. Subsequently, we present WaveCoder, a fine-tuned Code LLM with Widespread And Versatile Enhanced instruction tuning. This model is specifically designed for enhancing instruction tuning of Code Language Models (LLMs). Our experiments demonstrate that Wavecoder models outperform other open-source models in terms of generalization ability across different code-related tasks at the same level of fine-tuning scale. Moreover, Wavecoder exhibits high efficiency in previous code generation tasks. This paper thus offers a significant contribution to the field of instruction data generation and fine-tuning models, providing new insights and tools for enhancing performance in code-related tasks.

Recent work has shown the immense potential of synthetically generated datasets for training large language models (LLMs), especially for acquiring targeted skills. Current large-scale math instruction tuning datasets such as MetaMathQA (Yu et al., 2024) and MAmmoTH (Yue et al., 2024) are constructed using outputs from closed-source LLMs with commercially restrictive licenses. A key reason limiting the use of open-source LLMs in these data generation pipelines has been the wide gap between the mathematical skills of the best closed-source LLMs, such as GPT-4, and the best open-source LLMs. Building on the recent progress in open-source LLMs, our proposed prompting novelty, and some brute-force scaling, we construct OpenMathInstruct-1, a math instruction tuning dataset with 1.8M problem-solution pairs. The dataset is constructed by synthesizing code-interpreter solutions for GSM8K and MATH, two popular math reasoning benchmarks, using the recently released and permissively licensed Mixtral model. Our best model, OpenMath-CodeLlama-70B, trained on a subset of OpenMathInstruct-1, achieves a score of 84.6% on GSM8K and 50.7% on MATH, which is competitive with the best gpt-distilled models. We release our code, models, and the OpenMathInstruct-1 dataset under a commercially permissive license.

Recent advancements enlarge the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in zero-shot image-to-text generation and understanding by integrating multi-modal inputs. However, such success is typically limited to English scenarios due to the lack of large-scale and high-quality non-English multi-modal resources, making it extremely difficult to establish competitive counterparts in other languages. In this paper, we introduce the Ziya-VL series, a set of bilingual large-scale vision-language models (LVLMs) designed to incorporate visual semantics into LLM for multi-modal dialogue. Composed of Ziya-VL-Base and Ziya-VL-Chat, our models adopt the Querying Transformer from BLIP-2, further exploring the assistance of optimization schemes such as instruction tuning, multi-stage training and low-rank adaptation module for visual-language alignment. In addition, we stimulate the understanding ability of GPT-4 in multi-modal scenarios, translating our gathered English image-text datasets into Chinese and generating instruction-response through the in-context learning method. The experiment results demonstrate that compared to the existing LVLMs, Ziya-VL achieves competitive performance across a wide range of English-only tasks including zero-shot image-text retrieval, image captioning, and visual question answering. The evaluation leaderboard accessed by GPT-4 also indicates that our models possess satisfactory image-text understanding and generation capabilities in Chinese multi-modal scenario dialogues. Code, demo and models are available at ~https://huggingface.co/IDEA-CCNL/Ziya-BLIP2-14B-Visual-v1.

Medical systematic reviews can be very costly and resource intensive. We explore how Large Language Models (LLMs) can support and be trained to perform literature screening when provided with a detailed set of selection criteria. Specifically, we instruction tune LLaMA and Guanaco models to perform abstract screening for medical systematic reviews. Our best model, Bio-SIEVE, outperforms both ChatGPT and trained traditional approaches, and generalises better across medical domains. However, there remains the challenge of adapting the model to safety-first scenarios. We also explore the impact of multi-task training with Bio-SIEVE-Multi, including tasks such as PICO extraction and exclusion reasoning, but find that it is unable to match single-task Bio-SIEVE's performance. We see Bio-SIEVE as an important step towards specialising LLMs for the biomedical systematic review process and explore its future developmental opportunities. We release our models, code and a list of DOIs to reconstruct our dataset for reproducibility.

Large vision language models (VLMs) combine large language models with vision encoders, demonstrating promise across various tasks. However, they often underperform in task-specific applications due to domain gaps between pre-training and fine-tuning. We introduce VITask, a novel framework that enhances task-specific adaptability of VLMs by integrating task-specific models (TSMs). VITask employs three key strategies: exemplar prompting (EP), response distribution alignment (RDA), and contrastive response tuning (CRT) to improve the task-specific performance of VLMs by adjusting their response distributions. EP allows TSM features to guide VLMs, while RDA enables VLMs to adapt without TSMs during inference by learning from exemplar-prompted models. CRT further optimizes the ranking of correct image-response pairs, thereby reducing the risk of generating undesired responses. Experiments on 12 medical diagnosis datasets across 9 imaging modalities show that VITask outperforms both vanilla instruction-tuned VLMs and TSMs, showcasing its ability to integrate complementary features from both models effectively. Additionally, VITask offers practical advantages such as flexible TSM integration and robustness to incomplete instructions, making it a versatile and efficient solution for task-specific VLM tuning. Our code are available at https://github.com/baiyang4/VITask.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success, demonstrating powerful instruction-following capabilities across diverse tasks. Instruction fine-tuning is critical in enabling LLMs to align with user intentions and effectively follow instructions. In this work, we investigate how instruction fine-tuning modifies pre-trained models, focusing on two perspectives: instruction recognition and knowledge evolution. To study the behavior shift of LLMs, we employ a suite of local and global explanation methods, including a gradient-based approach for input-output attribution and techniques for interpreting patterns and concepts in self-attention and feed-forward layers. Our findings reveal three significant impacts of instruction fine-tuning: 1) It empowers LLMs to better recognize the instruction parts from user prompts, thereby facilitating high-quality response generation and addressing the ``lost-in-the-middle'' issue observed in pre-trained models; 2) It aligns the knowledge stored in feed-forward layers with user-oriented tasks, exhibiting minimal shifts across linguistic levels. 3) It facilitates the learning of word-word relations with instruction verbs through the self-attention mechanism, particularly in the lower and middle layers, indicating enhanced recognition of instruction words. These insights contribute to a deeper understanding of the behavior shifts in LLMs after instruction fine-tuning and lay the groundwork for future research aimed at interpreting and optimizing LLMs for various applications. We will release our code and data soon.

The Mixture of Experts (MoE) is a widely known neural architecture where an ensemble of specialized sub-models optimizes overall performance with a constant computational cost. However, conventional MoEs pose challenges at scale due to the need to store all experts in memory. In this paper, we push MoE to the limit. We propose extremely parameter-efficient MoE by uniquely combining MoE architecture with lightweight experts.Our MoE architecture outperforms standard parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods and is on par with full fine-tuning by only updating the lightweight experts -- less than 1% of an 11B parameters model. Furthermore, our method generalizes to unseen tasks as it does not depend on any prior task knowledge. Our research underscores the versatility of the mixture of experts architecture, showcasing its ability to deliver robust performance even when subjected to rigorous parameter constraints. Our code used in all the experiments is publicly available here: https://github.com/for-ai/parameter-efficient-moe.

Large language models (LLMs) that are tuned with instructions have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various tasks and languages. However, their ability to generalize to underrepresented languages is limited due to the scarcity of available data. Additionally, directly adapting new languages to instruction-tuned LLMs can result in catastrophic forgetting, which leads to the loss of multitasking ability. To address this issue, we propose InstructAlign which uses continual crosslingual instruction tuning to enable LLMs to align new unseen languages with previously learned high-resource languages. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of InstructAlign in enabling the model to understand low-resource languages with limited parallel data while preventing catastrophic forgetting. Our work contributes to the advancement of language adaptation methods, particularly for adapting instruction-tuned LLMs to underrepresented languages. Our code is released on https://github.com/HLTCHKUST/InstructAlign

Recently, Language Models (LMs) instruction-tuned on multiple tasks, also known as multitask-prompted fine-tuning (MT), have shown the capability to generalize to unseen tasks. Previous work has shown that scaling the number of training tasks is the key component in making stronger MT LMs. In this work, we report an unexpected finding that an expert LM fine-tuned on just a single task can outperform an MT LM trained with 300+ different tasks on 11 different unseen datasets and on 13 datasets of the BIG-bench benchmark by a mean accuracy of 3.20% and 1.29%, respectively. This finding casts doubt on the previously held belief that simply scaling the number of tasks makes stronger MT LMs. Leveraging this finding, we further show that this distributed approach of training a separate expert LM per training task instead of a single MT LM for zero-shot inference possesses many benefits including (1) avoiding negative task transfer that often occurs during instruction tuning, (2) being able to continually learn new tasks without having to re-train on previous tasks to avoid catastrophic forgetting, and (3) showing compositional capabilities when merging individual experts together. The code is available at https://github.com/joeljang/ELM.

Despite encouraging progress in 3D scene understanding, it remains challenging to develop an effective Large Multi-modal Model (LMM) that is capable of understanding and reasoning in complex 3D environments. Most previous methods typically encode 3D point and 2D image features separately, neglecting interactions between 2D semantics and 3D object properties, as well as the spatial relationships within the 3D environment. This limitation not only hinders comprehensive representations of 3D scene, but also compromises training and inference efficiency. To address these challenges, we propose a unified Instance-aware 3D Large Multi-modal Model (Inst3D-LMM) to deal with multiple 3D scene understanding tasks simultaneously. To obtain the fine-grained instance-level visual tokens, we first introduce a novel Multi-view Cross-Modal Fusion (MCMF) module to inject the multi-view 2D semantics into their corresponding 3D geometric features. For scene-level relation-aware tokens, we further present a 3D Instance Spatial Relation (3D-ISR) module to capture the intricate pairwise spatial relationships among objects. Additionally, we perform end-to-end multi-task instruction tuning simultaneously without the subsequent task-specific fine-tuning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods across 3D scene understanding, reasoning and grounding tasks. Source code is available at https://github.com/hanxunyu/Inst3D-LMM

We introduce mEdIT, a multi-lingual extension to CoEdIT -- the recent state-of-the-art text editing models for writing assistance. mEdIT models are trained by fine-tuning multi-lingual large, pre-trained language models (LLMs) via instruction tuning. They are designed to take instructions from the user specifying the attributes of the desired text in the form of natural language instructions, such as Grammatik korrigieren (German) or Parafrasee la oraci\'on (Spanish). We build mEdIT by curating data from multiple publicly available human-annotated text editing datasets for three text editing tasks (Grammatical Error Correction (GEC), Text Simplification, and Paraphrasing) across diverse languages belonging to six different language families. We detail the design and training of mEdIT models and demonstrate their strong performance on many multi-lingual text editing benchmarks against other multilingual LLMs. We also find that mEdIT generalizes effectively to new languages over multilingual baselines. We publicly release our data, code, and trained models at https://github.com/vipulraheja/medit.

Instruction tuning is a burgeoning method to elicit the general intelligence of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the creation of instruction data is still largely heuristic, leading to significant variation in quality and distribution across existing datasets. Experimental conclusions drawn from these datasets are also inconsistent, with some studies emphasizing the importance of scaling instruction numbers, while others argue that a limited number of samples suffice. To better understand data construction guidelines, we deepen our focus from the overall model performance to the growth of each underlying ability, such as creative writing, code generation, and logical reasoning. We systematically investigate the effects of data volume, parameter size, and data construction methods on the development of various abilities, using hundreds of model checkpoints (7b to 33b) fully instruction-tuned on a new collection of over 40k human-curated instruction data. This proposed dataset is stringently quality-controlled and categorized into ten distinct LLM abilities. Our study reveals three primary findings: (i) Despite data volume and parameter scale directly impacting models' overall performance, some abilities are more responsive to their increases and can be effectively trained using limited data, while some are highly resistant to these changes. (ii) Human-curated data strongly outperforms synthetic data from GPT-4 in efficiency and can constantly enhance model performance with volume increases, but is unachievable with synthetic data. (iii) Instruction data brings powerful cross-ability generalization, with evaluation results on out-of-domain data mirroring the first two observations. Furthermore, we demonstrate how these findings can guide more efficient data constructions, leading to practical performance improvements on public benchmarks.

The potential of large language models (LLMs) to simultaneously perform a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks has been the subject of extensive research. Although instruction tuning has proven to be a data-efficient method for transforming LLMs into such generalist models, their performance still lags behind specialist models trained exclusively for specific tasks. In this paper, we investigate whether incorporating broad-coverage generalist instruction tuning can contribute to building a specialist model. We hypothesize that its efficacy depends on task specificity and skill requirements. Our experiments assess four target tasks with distinct coverage levels, revealing that integrating generalist instruction tuning consistently enhances model performance when the task coverage is broad. The effect is particularly pronounced when the amount of task-specific training data is limited. Further investigation into three target tasks focusing on different capabilities demonstrates that generalist instruction tuning improves understanding and reasoning abilities. However, for tasks requiring factual knowledge, generalist data containing hallucinatory information may negatively affect the model's performance. Overall, our work provides a systematic guide for developing specialist models with general instruction tuning. Our code and other related resources can be found at https://github.com/DavidFanzz/Generalist_or_Specialist.

We introduce Bonito, an open-source model for conditional task generation: the task of converting unannotated text into task-specific training datasets for instruction tuning. Our goal is to enable zero-shot task adaptation of large language models on users' specialized, private data. We train Bonito on a new large-scale dataset with 1.65M examples created by remixing existing instruction tuning datasets into meta-templates. The meta-templates for a dataset produce training examples where the input is the unannotated text and the task attribute and the output consists of the instruction and the response. We use Bonito to generate synthetic tasks for seven datasets from specialized domains across three task types -- yes-no question answering, extractive question answering, and natural language inference -- and adapt language models. We show that Bonito significantly improves the average performance of pretrained and instruction tuned models over the de facto self supervised baseline. For example, adapting Mistral-Instruct-v2 and instruction tuned variants of Mistral and Llama2 with Bonito improves the strong zero-shot performance by 22.1 F1 points whereas the next word prediction objective undoes some of the benefits of instruction tuning and reduces the average performance by 0.8 F1 points. We conduct additional experiments with Bonito to understand the effects of the domain, the size of the training set, and the choice of alternative synthetic task generators. Overall, we show that learning with synthetic instruction tuning datasets is an effective way to adapt language models to new domains. The model, dataset, and code are available at https://github.com/BatsResearch/bonito.

Existing Image Quality Assessment (IQA) methods achieve remarkable success in analyzing quality for overall image, but few works explore quality analysis for Regions of Interest (ROIs). The quality analysis of ROIs can provide fine-grained guidance for image quality improvement and is crucial for scenarios focusing on region-level quality. This paper proposes a novel network, SEAGULL, which can SEe and Assess ROIs quality with GUidance from a Large vision-Language model. SEAGULL incorporates a vision-language model (VLM), masks generated by Segment Anything Model (SAM) to specify ROIs, and a meticulously designed Mask-based Feature Extractor (MFE) to extract global and local tokens for specified ROIs, enabling accurate fine-grained IQA for ROIs. Moreover, this paper constructs two ROI-based IQA datasets, SEAGULL-100w and SEAGULL-3k, for training and evaluating ROI-based IQA. SEAGULL-100w comprises about 100w synthetic distortion images with 33 million ROIs for pre-training to improve the model's ability of regional quality perception, and SEAGULL-3k contains about 3k authentic distortion ROIs to enhance the model's ability to perceive real world distortions. After pre-training on SEAGULL-100w and fine-tuning on SEAGULL-3k, SEAGULL shows remarkable performance on fine-grained ROI quality assessment. Code and datasets are publicly available at the https://github.com/chencn2020/Seagull.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently been extended to the vision-language realm, obtaining impressive general multi-modal capabilities. However, the exploration of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) for remote sensing (RS) data is still in its infancy, and the performance is not satisfactory. In this work, we introduce SkyEyeGPT, a unified multi-modal large language model specifically designed for RS vision-language understanding. To this end, we meticulously curate an RS multi-modal instruction tuning dataset, including single-task and multi-task conversation instructions. After manual verification, we obtain a high-quality RS instruction-following dataset with 968k samples. Our research demonstrates that with a simple yet effective design, SkyEyeGPT works surprisingly well on considerably different tasks without the need for extra encoding modules. Specifically, after projecting RS visual features to the language domain via an alignment layer, they are fed jointly with task-specific instructions into an LLM-based RS decoder to predict answers for RS open-ended tasks. In addition, we design a two-stage tuning method to enhance instruction-following and multi-turn dialogue ability at different granularities. Experiments on 8 datasets for RS vision-language tasks demonstrate SkyEyeGPT's superiority in image-level and region-level tasks, such as captioning and visual grounding. In particular, SkyEyeGPT exhibits encouraging results compared to GPT-4V in some qualitative tests. The online demo, code, and dataset will be released in https://github.com/ZhanYang-nwpu/SkyEyeGPT.

In this work, we evaluate 10 open-source instructed LLMs on four representative code comprehension and generation tasks. We have the following main findings. First, for the zero-shot setting, instructed LLMs are very competitive on code comprehension and generation tasks and sometimes even better than small SOTA models specifically fine-tuned on each downstream task. We also find that larger instructed LLMs are not always better on code-related tasks. Second, for the few-shot setting, we find that adding demonstration examples substantially helps instructed LLMs perform better on most code comprehension and generation tasks; however, the examples would sometimes induce unstable or even worse performance. Furthermore, we find widely-used BM25-based shot selection strategy significantly outperforms the basic random selection or fixed selection only on generation problems. Third, for the fine-tuning setting, we find that fine-tuning could further improve the model performance on downstream code comprehension and generation tasks compared to the zero-shot/one-shot performance. In addition, after being fine-tuned on the same downstream task dataset, instructed LLMs outperform both the small SOTA models and similar-scaled LLMs without instruction tuning. Based on our findings, we further present practical implications on model and usage recommendation, performance and cost trade-offs, and future direction.

We present QuantumLLMInstruct (QLMMI), an innovative dataset featuring over 500,000 meticulously curated instruction-following problem-solution pairs designed specifically for quantum computing - the largest and most comprehensive dataset of its kind. Originating from over 90 primary seed domains and encompassing hundreds of subdomains autonomously generated by LLMs, QLMMI marks a transformative step in the diversity and richness of quantum computing datasets. Designed for instruction fine-tuning, QLMMI seeks to significantly improve LLM performance in addressing complex quantum computing challenges across a wide range of quantum physics topics. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have propelled advancements in computational science with datasets like Omni-MATH and OpenMathInstruct, these primarily target Olympiad-level mathematics, leaving quantum computing largely unexplored. The creation of QLMMI follows a rigorous four-stage methodology. Initially, foundational problems are developed using predefined templates, focusing on critical areas such as synthetic Hamiltonians, QASM code generation, Jordan-Wigner transformations, and Trotter-Suzuki quantum circuit decompositions. Next, detailed and domain-specific solutions are crafted to ensure accuracy and relevance. In the third stage, the dataset is enriched through advanced reasoning techniques, including Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and Task-Oriented Reasoning and Action (ToRA), which enhance problem-solution diversity while adhering to strict mathematical standards. Lastly, a zero-shot Judge LLM performs self-assessments to validate the dataset's quality and reliability, minimizing human oversight requirements.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive multilingual understanding and reasoning capabilities, driven by extensive pre-training multilingual corpora and fine-tuning instruction data. However, a performance gap persists between high-resource and low-resource language tasks due to language imbalance in the pre-training corpus, even using more low-resource data during fine-tuning. To alleviate this issue, we propose LinguaLIFT, a two-stage instruction tuning framework for advancing low-resource language tasks. An additional language alignment layer is first integrated into the LLM to adapt a pre-trained multilingual encoder, thereby enhancing multilingual alignment through code-switched fine-tuning. The second stage fine-tunes LLM with English-only instruction data while freezing the language alignment layer, allowing LLM to transfer task-specific capabilities from English to low-resource language tasks. Additionally, we introduce the Multilingual Math World Problem (MMWP) benchmark, which spans 21 low-resource, 17 medium-resource, and 10 high-resource languages, enabling comprehensive evaluation of multilingual reasoning. Experimental results show that LinguaLIFT outperforms several competitive baselines across MMWP and other widely used benchmarks.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various tasks but still face challenges such as hallucinations. One potential reason for hallucinations is the lack of relevant knowledge or context. Thus, a promising solution to mitigate this issue involves instructing LLMs to respond with "I do not know" when a question falls outside their knowledge domain or the provided context. However, in this work, we observed that LLMs struggle to admit their lack of knowledge, primarily due to existing instruction datasets designed to encourage specific answers. To improve large language models' capability to recognize the boundaries of their knowledge, we propose a novel approach called uncertainty-sensitive tuning. This method involves two-stage training designed for uncertainty recognition and prompt-sensitive activation. In the first stage, we guide the LLM to reject unknown questions. In the second stage, we recover the decreased performance in QA tasks by incorporating designed causal instructions. By leveraging this method, we aim to enhance the model's ability to identify areas of uncertainty. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed uncertainty-sensitive tuning method significantly improves the performance of the Llama2-chat-7B model. Specifically, it achieves a substantial 34.7% improvement in handling questions involving knowledge gaps compared to the original model. Moreover, our approach outperforms GPT-4, exhibiting a 9.4% increase in overall performance. We open-source the model and code on GitHub.

Existing research has demonstrated that refining large language models (LLMs) through the utilization of machine-generated instruction-following data empowers these models to exhibit impressive zero-shot capabilities for novel tasks, without requiring human-authored instructions. In this paper, we systematically investigate, preprocess, and integrate three Chinese instruction-following datasets with the aim of enhancing the Chinese conversational capabilities of Mixtral-8x7B sparse Mixture-of-Experts model. Through instruction fine-tuning on this carefully processed dataset, we successfully construct the Mixtral-8x7B sparse Mixture-of-Experts model named "Aurora." To assess the performance of Aurora, we utilize three widely recognized benchmark tests: C-Eval, MMLU, and CMMLU. Empirical studies validate the effectiveness of instruction fine-tuning applied to Mixtral-8x7B sparse Mixture-of-Experts model. This work is pioneering in the execution of instruction fine-tuning on a sparse expert-mixed model, marking a significant breakthrough in enhancing the capabilities of this model architecture. Our code, data and model are publicly available at https://github.com/WangRongsheng/Aurora

Charts play a vital role in data visualization, understanding data patterns, and informed decision-making. However, their unique combination of graphical elements (e.g., bars, lines) and textual components (e.g., labels, legends) poses challenges for general-purpose multimodal models. While vision-language models trained on chart data excel in comprehension, they struggle with generalization and require task-specific fine-tuning. To address these challenges, we propose ChartAssistant, a chart-based vision-language model for universal chart comprehension and reasoning. ChartAssistant leverages ChartSFT, a comprehensive dataset covering diverse chart-related tasks with basic and specialized chart types. It undergoes a two-stage training process, starting with pre-training on chart-to-table parsing to align chart and text, followed by multitask instruction-following fine-tuning. This approach enables ChartAssistant to achieve competitive performance across various chart tasks without task-specific fine-tuning. Experimental results demonstrate significant performance gains over the state-of-the-art UniChart method, outperforming OpenAI's GPT-4V(ision) on real-world chart data. The code and data are available at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/ChartAst.

When human programmers have mastered a programming language, it would be easier when they learn a new programming language. In this report, we focus on exploring whether programming languages can boost each other during the instruction fine-tuning phase of code large language models. We conduct extensive experiments of 8 popular programming languages (Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, C, C++, Java, Go, HTML) on StarCoder. Results demonstrate that programming languages can significantly improve each other. For example, CodeM-Python 15B trained on Python is able to increase Java by an absolute 17.95% pass@1 on HumanEval-X. More surprisingly, we found that CodeM-HTML 7B trained on the HTML corpus can improve Java by an absolute 15.24% pass@1. Our training data is released at https://github.com/NL2Code/CodeM.

The automation of code review activities, a long-standing pursuit in software engineering, has been primarily addressed by numerous domain-specific pre-trained models. Despite their success, these models frequently demand extensive resources for pre-training from scratch. In contrast, Large Language Models (LLMs) provide an intriguing alternative, given their remarkable capabilities when supplemented with domain-specific knowledge. However, their potential for automating code review tasks remains largely unexplored. In response to this research gap, we present LLaMA-Reviewer, an innovative framework that leverages the capabilities of LLaMA, a popular LLM, in the realm of code review. Mindful of resource constraints, this framework employs parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods, delivering high performance while using less than 1% of trainable parameters. An extensive evaluation of LLaMA-Reviewer is conducted on two diverse, publicly available datasets. Notably, even with the smallest LLaMA base model consisting of 6.7B parameters and a limited number of tuning epochs, LLaMA-Reviewer equals the performance of existing code-review-focused models. The ablation experiments provide insights into the influence of various fine-tuning process components, including input representation, instruction tuning, and different PEFT methods. To foster continuous progress in this field, the code and all PEFT-weight plugins have been made open-source.

In this work we explore recent advances in instruction-tuning language models on a range of open instruction-following datasets. Despite recent claims that open models can be on par with state-of-the-art proprietary models, these claims are often accompanied by limited evaluation, making it difficult to compare models across the board and determine the utility of various resources. We provide a large set of instruction-tuned models from 6.7B to 65B parameters in size, trained on 12 instruction datasets ranging from manually curated (e.g., OpenAssistant) to synthetic and distilled (e.g., Alpaca) and systematically evaluate them on their factual knowledge, reasoning, multilinguality, coding, and open-ended instruction following abilities through a collection of automatic, model-based, and human-based metrics. We further introduce T\"ulu, our best performing instruction-tuned model suite finetuned on a combination of high-quality open resources. Our experiments show that different instruction-tuning datasets can uncover or enhance specific skills, while no single dataset (or combination) provides the best performance across all evaluations. Interestingly, we find that model and human preference-based evaluations fail to reflect differences in model capabilities exposed by benchmark-based evaluations, suggesting the need for the type of systemic evaluation performed in this work. Our evaluations show that the best model in any given evaluation reaches on average 83% of ChatGPT performance, and 68% of GPT-4 performance, suggesting that further investment in building better base models and instruction-tuning data is required to close the gap. We release our instruction-tuned models, including a fully finetuned 65B T\"ulu, along with our code, data, and evaluation framework at https://github.com/allenai/open-instruct to facilitate future research.

Effective instruction tuning is indispensable for optimizing code LLMs, aligning model behavior with user expectations and enhancing model performance in real-world applications. However, most existing methods focus on code snippets, which are limited to specific functionalities and rigid structures, restricting the complexity and diversity of the synthesized data. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel feature tree-based synthesis framework inspired by Abstract Syntax Trees (AST). Unlike AST, which captures syntactic structure of code, our framework models semantic relationships between code elements, enabling the generation of more nuanced and diverse data. The feature tree is constructed from raw data and refined iteratively to increase the quantity and diversity of the extracted features. This process enables the identification of more complex patterns and relationships within the code. By sampling subtrees with controlled depth and breadth, our framework allows precise adjustments to the complexity of the generated code, supporting a wide range of tasks from simple function-level operations to intricate multi-file scenarios. We fine-tuned widely-used base models to create the EpiCoder series, achieving state-of-the-art performance at both the function and file levels across multiple benchmarks. Notably, empirical evidence indicates that our approach shows significant potential in synthesizing highly complex repository-level code data. Further analysis elucidates the merits of this approach by rigorously assessing data complexity and diversity through software engineering principles and LLM-as-a-judge method.

Instruction tuning -- tuning large language models on instruction-output pairs -- is a promising technique for making models better adapted to the real world. Yet, the key factors driving the model's capability to understand and follow instructions not seen during training remain under-explored. Our investigation begins with a series of synthetic experiments within the theoretical framework of a Turing-complete algorithm called Markov algorithm, which allows fine-grained control over the instruction-tuning data. Generalization and robustness with respect to the training distribution emerge once a diverse enough set of tasks is provided, even though very few examples are provided for each task. We extend these initial results to a real-world application scenario of code generation and find that a more diverse instruction set, extending beyond code-related tasks, improves the performance of code generation. Our observations suggest that a more diverse semantic space for instruction-tuning sets greatly improves the model's ability to follow instructions and perform tasks.

Instruction tuning is a supervised fine-tuning approach that significantly improves the ability of large language models (LLMs) to follow human instructions. We propose SelfCodeAlign, the first fully transparent and permissive pipeline for self-aligning code LLMs without extensive human annotations or distillation. SelfCodeAlign employs the same base model for inference throughout the data generation process. It first extracts diverse coding concepts from high-quality seed snippets to generate new tasks. It then samples multiple responses per task, pairs each with test cases, and validates them in a sandbox environment. Finally, passing examples are selected for instruction tuning. In our primary experiments, we use SelfCodeAlign with CodeQwen1.5-7B to generate a dataset of 74k instruction-response pairs. Finetuning on this dataset leads to a model that achieves a 67.1 pass@1 on HumanEval+, surpassing CodeLlama-70B-Instruct despite being ten times smaller. Across all benchmarks, this finetuned model consistently outperforms the original version trained with OctoPack, the previous state-of-the-art method for instruction tuning without human annotations or distillation. Additionally, we show that SelfCodeAlign is effective across LLMs of various sizes, from 3B to 33B, and that the base models can benefit more from alignment with their own data distribution. We further validate each component's effectiveness in our pipeline, showing that SelfCodeAlign outperforms both direct distillation from GPT-4o and leading GPT-3.5-based distillation methods, such as OSS-Instruct and Evol-Instruct. SelfCodeAlign has also led to the creation of StarCoder2-Instruct, the first fully transparent, permissively licensed, and self-aligned code LLM that achieves state-of-the-art coding performance.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are difficult to fully fine-tune (e.g., with instructions or human feedback) due to their sheer number of parameters. A family of parameter-efficient sparse fine-tuning (SFT) methods have proven promising in terms of performance but their memory requirements increase proportionally to the size of the LLMs. In this work, we scale sparse fine-tuning to state-of-the-art LLMs like LLaMA 2 7B and 13B. At any given time, for a desired density level, we maintain an array of parameter indices and the deltas of these parameters relative to their pretrained values. We iterate among: (a) updating the active deltas, (b) pruning indices (based on the change of magnitude of their deltas) and (c) regrowth of indices. For regrowth, we explore two criteria based on either the accumulated gradients of a few candidate parameters or their approximate momenta estimated using the efficient SM3 optimizer. We experiment with instruction-tuning of LLMs on standard dataset mixtures, finding that SFT is often superior to popular parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods like LoRA (low-rank adaptation) in terms of performance and comparable in terms of run time. We additionally show that SFT is compatible with both quantization and efficient optimizers, to facilitate scaling to ever-larger model sizes. We release the code for SFT at https://github.com/AlanAnsell/peft and for the instruction-tuning experiments at https://github.com/ducdauge/sft-llm.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents, capable of performing a broad range of actions, such as invoking tools and controlling robots, show great potential in tackling real-world challenges. LLM agents are typically prompted to produce actions by generating JSON or text in a pre-defined format, which is usually limited by constrained action space (e.g., the scope of pre-defined tools) and restricted flexibility (e.g., inability to compose multiple tools). This work proposes to use executable Python code to consolidate LLM agents' actions into a unified action space (CodeAct). Integrated with a Python interpreter, CodeAct can execute code actions and dynamically revise prior actions or emit new actions upon new observations through multi-turn interactions. Our extensive analysis of 17 LLMs on API-Bank and a newly curated benchmark shows that CodeAct outperforms widely used alternatives (up to 20% higher success rate). The encouraging performance of CodeAct motivates us to build an open-source LLM agent that interacts with environments by executing interpretable code and collaborates with users using natural language. To this end, we collect an instruction-tuning dataset CodeActInstruct that consists of 7k multi-turn interactions using CodeAct. We show that it can be used with existing data to improve models in agent-oriented tasks without compromising their general capability. CodeActAgent, finetuned from Llama2 and Mistral, is integrated with Python interpreter and uniquely tailored to perform sophisticated tasks (e.g., model training) using existing libraries and autonomously self-debug.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable reasoning capabilities and become the foundation of language technologies. Inspired by the great success of code data in training LLMs, we naturally wonder at which training stage introducing code data can really help LLMs reasoning. To this end, this paper systematically explores the impact of code data on LLMs at different stages. Concretely, we introduce the code data at the pre-training stage, instruction-tuning stage, and both of them, respectively. Then, the reasoning capability of LLMs is comprehensively and fairly evaluated via six reasoning tasks in five domains. We critically analyze the experimental results and provide conclusions with insights. First, pre-training LLMs with the mixture of code and text can significantly enhance LLMs' general reasoning capability almost without negative transfer on other tasks. Besides, at the instruction-tuning stage, code data endows LLMs the task-specific reasoning capability. Moreover, the dynamic mixing strategy of code and text data assists LLMs to learn reasoning capability step-by-step during training. These insights deepen the understanding of LLMs regarding reasoning ability for their application, such as scientific question answering, legal support, etc. The source code and model parameters are released at the link:~https://github.com/yingweima2022/CodeLLM.

We introduce Magicoder, a series of fully open-source (code, weights, and data) Large Language Models (LLMs) for code that significantly closes the gap with top code models while having no more than 7B parameters. Magicoder models are trained on 75K synthetic instruction data using OSS-Instruct, a novel approach to enlightening LLMs with open-source code snippets to generate high-quality instruction data for code. Our main motivation is to mitigate the inherent bias of the synthetic data generated by LLMs by empowering them with a wealth of open-source references for the production of more diverse, realistic, and controllable data. The orthogonality of OSS-Instruct and other data generation methods like Evol-Instruct further enables us to build an enhanced MagicoderS. Both Magicoder and MagicoderS substantially outperform state-of-the-art code models with similar or even larger sizes on a wide range of coding benchmarks, including Python text-to-code generation, multilingual coding, and data-science program completion. Notably, MagicoderS-CL-7B based on CodeLlama even surpasses the prominent ChatGPT on HumanEval+ (66.5 vs. 65.9 in pass@1). Overall, OSS-Instruct opens a new direction for low-bias and high-quality instruction tuning using abundant open-source references.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited exceptional performance in software engineering yet face challenges in adapting to continually evolving code knowledge, particularly regarding the frequent updates of third-party library APIs. This limitation, stemming from static pre-training datasets, often results in non-executable code or implementations with suboptimal safety and efficiency. To this end, this paper introduces CODESYNC, a data engine for identifying outdated code patterns and collecting real-time code knowledge updates from Python third-party libraries. Building upon CODESYNC, we develop CODESYNCBENCH, a comprehensive benchmark for assessing LLMs' ability to stay synchronized with code evolution, which covers real-world updates for 220 APIs from six Python libraries. Our benchmark offers 3,300 test cases across three evaluation tasks and an update-aware instruction tuning dataset consisting of 2,200 training samples. Extensive experiments on 14 state-of-the-art LLMs reveal that they struggle with dynamic code evolution, even with the support of advanced knowledge updating methods (e.g., DPO, ORPO, and SimPO). We believe that our benchmark can offer a strong foundation for the development of more effective methods for real-time code knowledge updating in the future. The experimental code and dataset are publicly available at: https://github.com/Lucky-voyage/Code-Sync.

Code Large Language Models (Code LLMs), such as StarCoder, have demonstrated exceptional performance in code-related tasks. However, most existing models are solely pre-trained on extensive raw code data without instruction fine-tuning. In this paper, we introduce WizardCoder, which empowers Code LLMs with complex instruction fine-tuning, by adapting the Evol-Instruct method to the domain of code. Through comprehensive experiments on four prominent code generation benchmarks, namely HumanEval, HumanEval+, MBPP, and DS-1000, we unveil the exceptional capabilities of our model. It surpasses all other open-source Code LLMs by a substantial margin. Moreover, our model even outperforms the largest closed LLMs, Anthropic's Claude and Google's Bard, on HumanEval and HumanEval+. Our code, model weights, and data are public at https://github.com/nlpxucan/WizardLM

Reasoning about images with rich text, such as charts and documents, is a critical application of vision-language models (VLMs). However, VLMs often struggle in these domains due to the scarcity of diverse text-rich vision-language data. To address this challenge, we present CoSyn, a framework that leverages the coding capabilities of text-only large language models (LLMs) to automatically create synthetic text-rich multimodal data. Given input text describing a target domain (e.g., "nutrition fact labels"), CoSyn prompts an LLM to generate code (Python, HTML, LaTeX, etc.) for rendering synthetic images. With the underlying code as textual representations of the synthetic images, CoSyn can generate high-quality instruction-tuning data, again relying on a text-only LLM. Using CoSyn, we constructed a dataset comprising 400K images and 2.7M rows of vision-language instruction-tuning data. Comprehensive experiments on seven benchmarks demonstrate that models trained on our synthetic data achieve state-of-the-art performance among competitive open-source models, including Llama 3.2, and surpass proprietary models such as GPT-4V and Gemini 1.5 Flash. Furthermore, CoSyn can produce synthetic pointing data, enabling VLMs to ground information within input images, showcasing its potential for developing multimodal agents capable of acting in real-world environments.

This paper presents Safurai-001, a new Large Language Model (LLM) with significant potential in the domain of coding assistance. Driven by recent advancements in coding LLMs, Safurai-001 competes in performance with the latest models like WizardCoder [Xu et al., 2023], PanguCoder [Shen et al., 2023] and Phi-1 [Gunasekar et al., 2023] but aims to deliver a more conversational interaction. By capitalizing on the progress in data engineering (including latest techniques of data transformation and prompt engineering) and instruction tuning, this new model promises to stand toe-to-toe with recent closed and open source developments. Recognizing the need for an efficacious evaluation metric for coding LLMs, this paper also introduces GPT4-based MultiParameters, an evaluation benchmark that harnesses varied parameters to present a comprehensive insight into the models functioning and performance. Our assessment shows that Safurai-001 can outperform GPT-3.5 by 1.58% and WizardCoder by 18.78% in the Code Readability parameter and more.

We introduce Differential Performance Evaluation (DPE), a framework designed to reliably evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) for efficient code generation. Traditional coding benchmarks often fail to provide reliable insights into code efficiency, due to their reliance on simplistic test inputs and the absence of effective compound metrics. DPE addresses these issues by focusing on efficiency-demanding programming tasks and establishing an insightful compound metric for performance evaluation. DPE operates in two phases: To curate efficiency datasets, it selects efficiency-demanding tasks from existing coding benchmarks and generates computationally expensive inputs to stress the efficiency of LLM solutions. To assess the code efficiency, DPE profiles the new solution and compares it globally against a set of reference solutions that exhibit distinct efficiency levels, where the matched level defines its efficiency score. As a proof of concept, we use DPE to create EvalPerf, a benchmark with 121 performance-challenging coding tasks. Our comprehensive evaluation draws interesting findings on the efficiency impact of model sizes, instruction tuning, and prompting. For example, while the scaling law fails to account for code efficiency, general instruction tuning benefits both code correctness and efficiency. We also evaluate the evaluation by examining the effectiveness of DPE, showing that EvalPerf is reliable and convenient to use even across platforms.

We introduce AutoCoder, the first Large Language Model to surpass GPT-4 Turbo (April 2024) and GPT-4o in pass@1 on the Human Eval benchmark test (90.9% vs. 90.2%). In addition, AutoCoder offers a more versatile code interpreter compared to GPT-4 Turbo and GPT-4o. It's code interpreter can install external packages instead of limiting to built-in packages. AutoCoder's training data is a multi-turn dialogue dataset created by a system combining agent interaction and external code execution verification, a method we term \textsc{AIEV-Instruct} (Instruction Tuning with Agent-Interaction and Execution-Verified). Compared to previous large-scale code dataset generation methods, AIEV-Instruct reduces dependence on proprietary large models and provides execution-validated code dataset. The code and the demo video is available in https://github.com/bin123apple/AutoCoder.

Large language models (LLMs) pretrained on vast source code have achieved prominent progress in code intelligence. However, existing code LLMs have two main limitations in terms of architecture and pretraining tasks. First, they often adopt a specific architecture (encoder-only or decoder-only) or rely on a unified encoder-decoder network for different downstream tasks. The former paradigm is limited by inflexibility in applications while in the latter, the model is treated as a single system for all tasks, leading to suboptimal performance on a subset of tasks. Secondly, they often employ a limited set of pretraining objectives which might not be relevant to some downstream tasks and hence result in substantial performance degrade. To address these limitations, we propose ``CodeT5+'', a family of encoder-decoder LLMs for code in which component modules can be flexibly combined to suit a wide range of downstream code tasks. Such flexibility is enabled by our proposed mixture of pretraining objectives to mitigate the pretrain-finetune discrepancy. These objectives cover span denoising, contrastive learning, text-code matching, and causal LM pretraining tasks, on both unimodal and bimodal multilingual code corpora. Furthermore, we propose to initialize CodeT5+ with frozen off-the-shelf LLMs without training from scratch to efficiently scale up our models, and explore instruction-tuning to align with natural language instructions. We extensively evaluate CodeT5+ on over 20 code-related benchmarks in different settings, including zero-shot, finetuning, and instruction-tuning. We observe state-of-the-art (SoTA) model performance on various code-related tasks, such as code generation and completion, math programming, and text-to-code retrieval tasks. Particularly, our instruction-tuned CodeT5+ 16B achieves new SoTA results on HumanEval code generation task against other open code LLMs.

Underlying data distributions of natural language, programming code, and mathematical symbols vary vastly, presenting a complex challenge for large language models (LLMs) that strive to achieve high performance across all three domains simultaneously. Achieving a very high level of proficiency for an LLM within a specific domain often requires extensive training with relevant corpora, which is typically accompanied by a sacrifice in performance in other domains. In this paper, we propose to fuse models that are already highly-specialized directly. The proposed fusing framework, UltraFuser, consists of three distinct specialists that are already sufficiently trained on language, coding, and mathematics. A token-level gating mechanism is introduced to blend the specialists' outputs. A two-stage training strategy accompanied by balanced sampling is designed to ensure stability. To effectively train the fused model, we further construct a high-quality supervised instruction tuning dataset, UltraChat 2, which includes text, code, and mathematical content. This dataset comprises approximately 300,000 instructions and covers a wide range of topics in each domain. Experiments show that our model could simultaneously achieve mastery of the three crucial domains.

Large Language Models for Code (Code LLM) are flourishing. New and powerful models are released on a weekly basis, demonstrating remarkable performance on the code generation task. Various approaches have been proposed to boost the code generation performance of pre-trained Code LLMs, such as supervised fine-tuning, instruction tuning, reinforcement learning, etc. In this paper, we propose a novel RRTF (Rank Responses to align Test&Teacher Feedback) framework, which can effectively and efficiently boost pre-trained large language models for code generation. Under this framework, we present PanGu-Coder2, which achieves 62.20% pass@1 on the OpenAI HumanEval benchmark. Furthermore, through an extensive evaluation on CoderEval and LeetCode benchmarks, we show that PanGu-Coder2 consistently outperforms all previous Code LLMs.

CodeLLMs have demonstrated remarkable advancements in software engineering tasks. However, while these models can generate functionally correct code, they often produce code that is inefficient in terms of runtime. This inefficiency is particularly problematic in resource-constrained environments, impacting software performance and sustainability. Existing approaches for optimizing code efficiency for CodeLLMs like SOAP and PIE exhibit certain limitations. SOAP requires a compatible execution environment and predefined test cases for iterative code modification, while PIE focuses on instruction tuning, improving efficiency but compromising correctness. These shortcomings highlight the need for a fine-tuning framework that optimizes both efficiency and correctness without relying on predefined test cases or specific execution environments. To bridge this gap, we introduce ACECode, a reinforcement learning-based fine-tuning framework that aligns CodeLLMs with dual objectives of efficiency and correctness. ACECode combines three key steps: (1) generating code with an actor CodeLLM, (2) calculating a training-free reward signal derived from code execution feedback for each generated code, and (3) optimizing the CodeLLM via Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm. This reward signal enables joint assessment of efficiency and correctness without manual labeling. We evaluate ACECode by fine-tuning four SOTA (state-of-the-art) CodeLLMs and comparing their code with three baselines: original, instruction-tuned, and PIE-tuned CodeLLMs. Extensive experiment results suggest that significantly improves the efficiency and correctness of generated code against all baselines for all CodeLLMs. Specifically, CodeLLMs fine-tuned with ACECode improve pass@1 by 1.84% to 14.51% and reduce runtime in 65% to 72% of cases compared to original CodeLLMs.

Safety backdoor attacks in large language models (LLMs) enable the stealthy triggering of unsafe behaviors while evading detection during normal interactions. The high dimensionality of potential triggers in the token space and the diverse range of malicious behaviors make this a critical challenge. We present BEEAR, a mitigation approach leveraging the insight that backdoor triggers induce relatively uniform drifts in the model's embedding space. Our bi-level optimization method identifies universal embedding perturbations that elicit unwanted behaviors and adjusts the model parameters to reinforce safe behaviors against these perturbations. Experiments show BEEAR reduces the success rate of RLHF time backdoor attacks from >95% to <1% and from 47% to 0% for instruction-tuning time backdoors targeting malicious code generation, without compromising model utility. Requiring only defender-defined safe and unwanted behaviors, BEEAR represents a step towards practical defenses against safety backdoors in LLMs, providing a foundation for further advancements in AI safety and security.

Recently, large language models (LLMs), especially those that are pretrained on code, have demonstrated strong capabilities in generating programs from natural language inputs in a few-shot or even zero-shot manner. Despite promising results, there is a notable lack of a comprehensive evaluation of these models language-to-code generation capabilities. Existing studies often focus on specific tasks, model architectures, or learning paradigms, leading to a fragmented understanding of the overall landscape. In this work, we present L2CEval, a systematic evaluation of the language-to-code generation capabilities of LLMs on 7 tasks across the domain spectrum of semantic parsing, math reasoning and Python programming, analyzing the factors that potentially affect their performance, such as model size, pretraining data, instruction tuning, and different prompting methods. In addition to assessing model performance, we measure confidence calibration for the models and conduct human evaluations of the output programs. This enables us to identify and analyze the typical failure modes across various tasks and models. L2CEval offers a comprehensive understanding of the capabilities and limitations of LLMs in language-to-code generation. We also release the evaluation framework and all model outputs, hoping to lay the groundwork for further future research in this domain.

We study the depth of grade-school math (GSM) problem-solving capabilities of LLMs. To this end, we evaluate their performance on pairs of existing math word problems together so that the answer to the second problem depends on correctly answering the first problem. Our findings reveal a significant reasoning gap in most LLMs, that is performance difference between solving the compositional pairs and solving each question independently. This gap is more pronounced in smaller, more cost-efficient, and math-specialized models. Moreover, instruction-tuning recipes and code generation have varying effects across LLM sizes, while finetuning on GSM can lead to task overfitting. Our analysis indicates that large reasoning gaps are not because of test-set leakage, but due to distraction from additional context and poor second-hop reasoning. Overall, LLMs exhibit systematic differences in their reasoning abilities, despite what their performance on standard benchmarks indicates.

The vast majority of today's large language models are English-centric, having been pretrained predominantly on English text. Yet, in order to meet user expectations, models need to be able to respond appropriately in multiple languages once deployed in downstream applications. Given limited exposure to other languages during pretraining, cross-lingual transfer is important for achieving decent performance in non-English settings. In this work, we investigate just how much multilinguality is required during finetuning to elicit strong cross-lingual generalisation across a range of tasks and target languages. We find that, compared to English-only finetuning, multilingual instruction tuning with as few as three languages significantly improves a model's cross-lingual transfer abilities on generative tasks that assume input/output language agreement, while being of less importance for highly structured tasks. Our code and data is available at https://github.com/ZurichNLP/multilingual-instruction-tuning.

Optimization problems are prevalent across various scenarios. Formulating and then solving optimization problems described by natural language often requires highly specialized human expertise, which could block the widespread application of optimization-based decision making. To automate problem formulation and solving, leveraging large language models (LLMs) has emerged as a potential way. However, this kind of approach suffers from the issue of optimization generalization. Namely, the accuracy of most current LLM-based methods and the generality of optimization problem types that they can model are still limited. In this paper, we propose a unified learning-based framework called LLMOPT to boost optimization generalization. Starting from the natural language descriptions of optimization problems and a pre-trained LLM, LLMOPT constructs the introduced five-element formulation as a universal model for learning to define diverse optimization problem types. Then, LLMOPT employs the multi-instruction tuning to enhance both problem formalization and solver code generation accuracy and generality. After that, to prevent hallucinations in LLMs, such as sacrificing solving accuracy to avoid execution errors, the model alignment and self-correction mechanism are adopted in LLMOPT. We evaluate the optimization generalization ability of LLMOPT and compared methods across six real-world datasets covering roughly 20 fields such as health, environment, energy and manufacturing, etc. Extensive experiment results show that LLMOPT is able to model various optimization problem types such as linear/nonlinear programming, mixed integer programming, and combinatorial optimization, and achieves a notable 11.08% average solving accuracy improvement compared with the state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/caigaojiang/LLMOPT.

We introduce Cambrian-1, a family of multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) designed with a vision-centric approach. While stronger language models can enhance multimodal capabilities, the design choices for vision components are often insufficiently explored and disconnected from visual representation learning research. This gap hinders accurate sensory grounding in real-world scenarios. Our study uses LLMs and visual instruction tuning as an interface to evaluate various visual representations, offering new insights into different models and architectures -- self-supervised, strongly supervised, or combinations thereof -- based on experiments with over 20 vision encoders. We critically examine existing MLLM benchmarks, addressing the difficulties involved in consolidating and interpreting results from various tasks, and introduce a new vision-centric benchmark, CV-Bench. To further improve visual grounding, we propose the Spatial Vision Aggregator (SVA), a dynamic and spatially-aware connector that integrates high-resolution vision features with LLMs while reducing the number of tokens. Additionally, we discuss the curation of high-quality visual instruction-tuning data from publicly available sources, emphasizing the importance of data source balancing and distribution ratio. Collectively, Cambrian-1 not only achieves state-of-the-art performance but also serves as a comprehensive, open cookbook for instruction-tuned MLLMs. We provide model weights, code, supporting tools, datasets, and detailed instruction-tuning and evaluation recipes. We hope our release will inspire and accelerate advancements in multimodal systems and visual representation learning.

We introduce HyperCLOVA X, a family of large language models (LLMs) tailored to the Korean language and culture, along with competitive capabilities in English, math, and coding. HyperCLOVA X was trained on a balanced mix of Korean, English, and code data, followed by instruction-tuning with high-quality human-annotated datasets while abiding by strict safety guidelines reflecting our commitment to responsible AI. The model is evaluated across various benchmarks, including comprehensive reasoning, knowledge, commonsense, factuality, coding, math, chatting, instruction-following, and harmlessness, in both Korean and English. HyperCLOVA X exhibits strong reasoning capabilities in Korean backed by a deep understanding of the language and cultural nuances. Further analysis of the inherent bilingual nature and its extension to multilingualism highlights the model's cross-lingual proficiency and strong generalization ability to untargeted languages, including machine translation between several language pairs and cross-lingual inference tasks. We believe that HyperCLOVA X can provide helpful guidance for regions or countries in developing their sovereign LLMs.

In this paper, we propose KnowCoder, a Large Language Model (LLM) to conduct Universal Information Extraction (UIE) via code generation. KnowCoder aims to develop a kind of unified schema representation that LLMs can easily understand and an effective learning framework that encourages LLMs to follow schemas and extract structured knowledge accurately. To achieve these, KnowCoder introduces a code-style schema representation method to uniformly transform different schemas into Python classes, with which complex schema information, such as constraints among tasks in UIE, can be captured in an LLM-friendly manner. We further construct a code-style schema library covering over 30,000 types of knowledge, which is the largest one for UIE, to the best of our knowledge. To ease the learning process of LLMs, KnowCoder contains a two-phase learning framework that enhances its schema understanding ability via code pretraining and its schema following ability via instruction tuning. After code pretraining on around 1.5B automatically constructed data, KnowCoder already attains remarkable generalization ability and achieves relative improvements by 49.8% F1, compared to LLaMA2, under the few-shot setting. After instruction tuning, KnowCoder further exhibits strong generalization ability on unseen schemas and achieves up to 12.5% and 21.9%, compared to sota baselines, under the zero-shot setting and the low resource setting, respectively. Additionally, based on our unified schema representations, various human-annotated datasets can simultaneously be utilized to refine KnowCoder, which achieves significant improvements up to 7.5% under the supervised setting.

Influence functions provide crucial insights into model training, but existing methods suffer from large computational costs and limited generalization. Particularly, recent works have proposed various metrics and algorithms to calculate the influence of data using language models, which do not scale well with large models and datasets. This is because of the expensive forward and backward passes required for computation, substantial memory requirements to store large models, and poor generalization of influence estimates to new data. In this paper, we explore the use of small neural networks -- which we refer to as the InfluenceNetwork -- to estimate influence values, achieving up to 99% cost reduction. Our evaluation demonstrates that influence values can be estimated with models just 0.0027% the size of full language models (we use 7B and 8B versions). We apply our algorithm of estimating influence values (called NN-CIFT: Neural Networks for effiCient Instruction Fine-Tuning) to the downstream task of subset selection for general instruction fine-tuning. In our study, we include four state-of-the-art influence functions and show no compromise in performance, despite large speedups, between NN-CIFT and the original influence functions. We provide an in-depth hyperparameter analyses of NN-CIFT. The code for our method can be found here: https://github.com/agarwalishika/NN-CIFT.

We introduce Lemur and Lemur-Chat, openly accessible language models optimized for both natural language and coding capabilities to serve as the backbone of versatile language agents. The evolution from language chat models to functional language agents demands that models not only master human interaction, reasoning, and planning but also ensure grounding in the relevant environments. This calls for a harmonious blend of language and coding capabilities in the models. Lemur and Lemur-Chat are proposed to address this necessity, demonstrating balanced proficiencies in both domains, unlike existing open-source models that tend to specialize in either. Through meticulous pre-training using a code-intensive corpus and instruction fine-tuning on text and code data, our models achieve state-of-the-art averaged performance across diverse text and coding benchmarks among open-source models. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate Lemur's superiority over existing open-source models and its proficiency across various agent tasks involving human communication, tool usage, and interaction under fully- and partially- observable environments. The harmonization between natural and programming languages enables Lemur-Chat to significantly narrow the gap with proprietary models on agent abilities, providing key insights into developing advanced open-source agents adept at reasoning, planning, and operating seamlessly across environments. https://github.com/OpenLemur/Lemur

Code generation has attracted increasing attention with the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs). Many studies have developed powerful code LLMs by synthesizing code-related instruction data and applying supervised fine-tuning. However, these methods are limited by teacher model distillation and ignore the potential of iterative refinement by self-generated code. In this paper, we propose Adaptive Critique Refinement (ACR), which enables the model to refine itself by self-generated code and external critique, rather than directly imitating the code responses of the teacher model. Concretely, ACR includes a composite scoring system with LLM-as-a-Judge to evaluate the quality of code responses and a selective critique strategy with LLM-as-a-Critic to critique self-generated low-quality code responses. We develop the RefineCoder series by iteratively applying ACR, achieving continuous performance improvement on multiple code generation benchmarks. Compared to the baselines of the same size, our proposed RefineCoder series can achieve comparable or even superior performance using less data.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated a remarkable ability to generate code from natural language (NL) prompts. However, in the real world, NL is often too ambiguous to capture the true intent behind programming problems, requiring additional input-output (I/O) specifications. Unfortunately, LLMs can have difficulty aligning their outputs with both the NL prompt and the I/O specification. In this paper, we give a way to mitigate this issue in the context of data science programming, where tasks require explicit I/O specifications for clarity. Specifically, we propose GIFT4Code, a novel approach for the instruction fine-tuning of LLMs with respect to I/O specifications. Our method leverages synthetic data produced by the LLM itself and utilizes execution-derived feedback as a key learning signal. This feedback, in the form of program I/O specifications, is provided to the LLM to facilitate instruction fine-tuning. We evaluated our approach on two challenging data science benchmarks, Arcade and DS-1000. The results demonstrate a significant improvement in the LLM's ability to generate code that is not only executable but also accurately aligned with user specifications, substantially improving the quality of code generation for complex data science tasks.

Large language models (LLMs) have made impressive progress in handling simple math problems, yet they still struggle with more challenging and complex mathematical tasks. In this paper, we introduce a series of LLMs that employs the Decomposition of thought with code assistance and self-correction for mathematical reasoning, dubbed as DotaMath. DotaMath models tackle complex mathematical tasks by decomposing them into simpler logical subtasks, leveraging code to solve these subtasks, obtaining fine-grained feedback from the code interpreter, and engaging in self-reflection and correction. By annotating diverse interactive tool-use trajectories and employing query evolution on GSM8K and MATH datasets, we generate an instruction fine-tuning dataset called DotaMathQA with 574K query-response pairs. We train a series of base LLMs using imitation learning on DotaMathQA, resulting in DotaMath models that achieve remarkable performance compared to open-source LLMs across various in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks. Notably, DotaMath-deepseek-7B showcases an outstanding performance of 64.8% on the competitive MATH dataset and 86.7% on GSM8K. Besides, DotaMath-deepseek-7B maintains strong competitiveness on a series of in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks (Avg. 80.1%). Looking forward, we anticipate that the DotaMath paradigm will open new pathways for addressing intricate mathematical problems. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ChengpengLi1003/DotaMath.

Code large language models (codeLLMs) have made significant strides in code generation. Most previous code-related benchmarks, which consist of various programming exercises along with the corresponding test cases, are used as a common measure to evaluate the performance and capabilities of code LLMs. However, the current code LLMs focus on synthesizing the correct code snippet, ignoring the alignment with human preferences, where the query should be sampled from the practical application scenarios and the model-generated responses should satisfy the human preference. To bridge the gap between the model-generated response and human preference, we present a rigorous human-curated benchmark CodeArena to emulate the complexity and diversity of real-world coding tasks, where 397 high-quality samples spanning 40 categories and 44 programming languages, carefully curated from user queries. Further, we propose a diverse synthetic instruction corpus SynCode-Instruct (nearly 20B tokens) by scaling instructions from the website to verify the effectiveness of the large-scale synthetic instruction fine-tuning, where Qwen2.5-SynCoder totally trained on synthetic instruction data can achieve top-tier performance of open-source code LLMs. The results find performance differences between execution-based benchmarks and CodeArena. Our systematic experiments of CodeArena on 40+ LLMs reveal a notable performance gap between open SOTA code LLMs (e.g. Qwen2.5-Coder) and proprietary LLMs (e.g., OpenAI o1), underscoring the importance of the human preference alignment.\url{https://codearenaeval.github.io/ }

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) can cause them to lose their general capabilities. However, the intrinsic mechanisms behind such forgetting remain unexplored. In this paper, we begin by examining this phenomenon by focusing on knowledge understanding and instruction following, with the latter identified as the main contributor to forgetting during fine-tuning. Consequently, we propose the Instruction Vector (IV) framework to capture model representations highly related to specific instruction-following capabilities, thereby making it possible to understand model-intrinsic forgetting. Through the analysis of IV dynamics pre and post-training, we suggest that fine-tuning mostly adds specialized reasoning patterns instead of erasing previous skills, which may appear as forgetting. Building on this insight, we develop IV-guided training, which aims to preserve original computation graph, thereby mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Empirical tests on three benchmarks confirm the efficacy of this new approach, supporting the relationship between IVs and forgetting. Our code will be made available soon.

sec:abstract Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in assisting scientific discovery. However, such applications are currently limited by LLMs' deficiencies in understanding intricate scientific concepts, deriving symbolic equations, and solving advanced numerical calculations. To bridge these gaps, we introduce SciGLM, a suite of scientific language models able to conduct college-level scientific reasoning. Central to our approach is a novel self-reflective instruction annotation framework to address the data scarcity challenge in the science domain. This framework leverages existing LLMs to generate step-by-step reasoning for unlabelled scientific questions, followed by a process of self-reflective critic-and-revise. Applying this framework, we curated SciInstruct, a diverse and high-quality dataset encompassing mathematics, physics, chemistry, and formal proofs. We fine-tuned the ChatGLM family of language models with SciInstruct, enhancing their capabilities in scientific and mathematical reasoning. Remarkably, SciGLM consistently improves both the base model (ChatGLM3-6B-Base) and larger-scale models (12B and 32B), without sacrificing the language understanding capabilities of the base model. This makes SciGLM a suitable foundational model to facilitate diverse scientific discovery tasks. For the benefit of the wider research community, we release SciInstruct, SciGLM, alongside a self-reflective framework and fine-tuning code at https://github.com/THUDM/SciGLM.

Software engineering activities frequently involve edits to existing code. However, contemporary code language models (LMs) lack the ability to handle diverse types of code-edit requirements. In this work, we attempt to overcome this shortcoming through (1) a novel synthetic data generation pipeline and (2) a robust model adaptation algorithm. Starting with seed code examples and diverse editing criteria, our pipeline generates high-quality samples comprising original and modified code, along with natural language instructions in different styles and verbosity. Today's code LMs come bundled with strong abilities, such as code generation and instruction following, which should not be lost due to fine-tuning. To ensure this, we propose a novel adaptation algorithm, SeleKT, that (a) leverages a dense gradient-based step to identify the weights that are most important for code editing, and (b) does a sparse projection onto the base model to avoid overfitting. Using our approach, we obtain a new series of models NextCoder (adapted from QwenCoder-2.5) that achieves strong results on five code-editing benchmarks, outperforming comparable size models and even several larger ones. We show the generality of our approach on two model families (DeepSeekCoder and QwenCoder), compare against other fine-tuning approaches, and demonstrate robustness by showing retention of code generation abilities post adaptation.

When employing the Socratic method of teaching, instructors guide students toward solving a problem on their own rather than providing the solution directly. While this strategy can substantially improve learning outcomes, it is usually time-consuming and cognitively demanding. Automated Socratic conversational agents can augment human instruction and provide the necessary scale, however their development is hampered by the lack of suitable data for training and evaluation. In this paper, we introduce a manually created dataset of multi-turn Socratic advice that is aimed at helping a novice programmer fix buggy solutions to simple computational problems. The dataset is then used for benchmarking the Socratic debugging abilities of a number of language models, ranging from fine-tuning the instruction-based text-to-text transformer Flan-T5 to zero-shot and chain of thought prompting of the much larger GPT-4. The code and datasets are made freely available for research at the link below. https://github.com/taisazero/socratic-debugging-benchmark

Large language models (LLMs) have excelled in various NLP tasks, including machine translation (MT), yet most studies focus on sentence-level translation. This work investigates the inherent capability of instruction-tuned LLMs for document-level translation (docMT). Unlike prior approaches that require specialized techniques, we evaluate LLMs by directly prompting them to translate entire documents in a single pass. Our results show that this method improves translation quality compared to translating sentences separately, even without document-level fine-tuning. However, this advantage is not reflected in BLEU scores, which often favor sentence-based translations. We propose using the LLM-as-a-judge paradigm for evaluation, where GPT-4 is used to assess document coherence, accuracy, and fluency in a more nuanced way than n-gram-based metrics. Overall, our work demonstrates that instruction-tuned LLMs can effectively leverage document context for translation. However, we caution against using BLEU scores for evaluating docMT, as they often provide misleading outcomes, failing to capture the quality of document-level translation. Code and data are available at https://github.com/EIT-NLP/BLEUless_DocMT

Open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) and their specialized variants, particularly Code LLMs, have recently delivered impressive performance. However, previous Code LLMs are typically fine-tuned on single-source data with limited quality and diversity, which may insufficiently elicit the potential of pre-trained Code LLMs. In this paper, we present AlchemistCoder, a series of Code LLMs with enhanced code generation and generalization capabilities fine-tuned on multi-source data. To achieve this, we pioneer to unveil inherent conflicts among the various styles and qualities in multi-source code corpora and introduce data-specific prompts with hindsight relabeling, termed AlchemistPrompts, to harmonize different data sources and instruction-response pairs. Additionally, we propose incorporating the data construction process into the fine-tuning data as code comprehension tasks, including instruction evolution, data filtering, and code review. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AlchemistCoder holds a clear lead among all models of the same size (6.7B/7B) and rivals or even surpasses larger models (15B/33B/70B), showcasing the efficacy of our method in refining instruction-following capabilities and advancing the boundaries of code intelligence.

The fine-tuning of Large Language Models (LLMs) specialized in code generation has seen notable advancements through the use of open-domain coding queries. Despite the successes, existing methodologies like Evol-Instruct encounter performance limitations, impeding further enhancements in code generation tasks. This paper examines the constraints of existing prompt evolution techniques and introduces a novel approach, Instruction Fusion (IF). IF innovatively combines two distinct prompts through a hybridization process, thereby enhancing the evolution of training prompts for code LLMs. Our experimental results reveal that the proposed novel method effectively addresses the shortcomings of prior methods, significantly improving the performance of Code LLMs across five code generation benchmarks, namely HumanEval, HumanEval+, MBPP, MBPP+ and MultiPL-E, which underscore the effectiveness of Instruction Fusion in advancing the capabilities of LLMs in code generation.

Fine-tuning on generalized tasks such as instruction following, code generation, and mathematics has been shown to enhance language models' performance on a range of tasks. Nevertheless, explanations of how such fine-tuning influences the internal computations in these models remain elusive. We study how fine-tuning affects the internal mechanisms implemented in language models. As a case study, we explore the property of entity tracking, a crucial facet of language comprehension, where models fine-tuned on mathematics have substantial performance gains. We identify the mechanism that enables entity tracking and show that (i) in both the original model and its fine-tuned versions primarily the same circuit implements entity tracking. In fact, the entity tracking circuit of the original model on the fine-tuned versions performs better than the full original model. (ii) The circuits of all the models implement roughly the same functionality: Entity tracking is performed by tracking the position of the correct entity in both the original model and its fine-tuned versions. (iii) Performance boost in the fine-tuned models is primarily attributed to its improved ability to handle the augmented positional information. To uncover these findings, we employ: Patch Patching, DCM, which automatically detects model components responsible for specific semantics, and CMAP, a new approach for patching activations across models to reveal improved mechanisms. Our findings suggest that fine-tuning enhances, rather than fundamentally alters, the mechanistic operation of the model.

Recently, the release of INSTRUCTEVAL has provided valuable insights into the performance of large language models (LLMs) that utilize encoder-decoder or decoder-only architecture. Interestingly, despite being introduced four years ago, T5-based LLMs, such as FLAN-T5, continue to outperform the latest decoder-based LLMs, such as LLAMA and VICUNA, on tasks that require general problem-solving skills. This performance discrepancy can be attributed to three key factors: (1) Pre-training data, (2) Backbone architecture, and (3) Instruction dataset. In this technical report, our main focus is on investigating the impact of the third factor by leveraging VICUNA, a large language model based on LLAMA, which has undergone fine-tuning on ChatGPT conversations. To achieve this objective, we fine-tuned VICUNA using a customized instruction dataset collection called FLANMINI. This collection includes a subset of the large-scale instruction dataset known as FLAN, as well as various code-related datasets and conversational datasets derived from ChatGPT/GPT-4. This dataset comprises a large number of tasks that demand problem-solving skills. Our experimental findings strongly indicate that the enhanced problem-solving abilities of our model, FLACUNA, are obtained through fine-tuning VICUNA on the FLAN dataset, leading to significant improvements across numerous benchmark datasets in INSTRUCTEVAL. FLACUNA is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/declare-lab/flacuna-13b-v1.0.

Large language models (LLMs) with enormous pre-training tokens and parameter amounts emerge abilities, including math reasoning, code generation, and instruction following. These abilities are further enhanced by supervised fine-tuning (SFT). The open-source community has studied on ad-hoc SFT for each ability, while proprietary LLMs are versatile for all abilities. It is important to investigate how to unlock them with multiple abilities via SFT. In this study, we specifically focus on the data composition between mathematical reasoning, code generation, and general human-aligning abilities during SFT. From a scaling perspective, we investigate the relationship between model abilities and various factors including data amounts, data composition ratio, model parameters, and SFT strategies. Our experiments reveal that different abilities exhibit different scaling patterns, and larger models generally show superior performance with the same amount of data. Mathematical reasoning and code generation improve as data amounts increase consistently, while the general ability is enhanced with about a thousand samples and improves slowly. We find data composition results in various abilities improvements with low data amounts, while conflicts of abilities with high data amounts. Our experiments further show that composition data amount impacts performance, while the influence of composition ratio is insignificant. Regarding the SFT strategies, we evaluate sequential learning multiple abilities are prone to catastrophic forgetting. Our proposed Dual-stage Mixed Fine-tuning (DMT) strategy learns specialized abilities first and then learns general abilities with a small amount of specialized data to prevent forgetting, offering a promising solution to learn multiple abilities with different scaling patterns.

Aligned language models face a significant limitation as their fine-tuning often results in compromised safety. To tackle this, we propose a simple method RESTA that performs LLM safety realignment. RESTA stands for REstoring Safety through Task Arithmetic. At its core, it involves a simple arithmetic addition of a safety vector to the weights of the compromised model. We demonstrate the effectiveness of RESTA in both parameter-efficient and full fine-tuning, covering a wide range of downstream tasks, including instruction following in Chinese, English, and Hindi, as well as problem-solving capabilities in Code and Math. We also showcase the generalizability of RESTA on three existing safety evaluation benchmarks and a multilingual benchmark dataset proposed as a part of this work, consisting of 550 harmful questions covering 11 categories, each with 5 sub-categories of harm. Overall, RESTA decreases the harmfulness of the compromised model from 18.6% to 5.1% and from 9.2% to 1.5% in parameter-efficient and full fine-tuning, respectively, while maintaining most of the model's performance on the task. We release the source codes at: https://github.com/declare-lab/resta.

Instruction tuning is instrumental in enabling Large Language Models~(LLMs) to follow user instructions to complete various open-domain tasks. The success of instruction tuning depends on the availability of high-quality instruction data. Owing to the exorbitant cost and substandard quality of human annotation, recent works have been deeply engaged in the exploration of the utilization of powerful closed-source models to generate instruction data automatically. However, these methods carry potential risks arising from the usage requirements of powerful closed-source models, which strictly forbid the utilization of their outputs to develop machine learning models. To deal with this problem, in this work, we explore alternative approaches to generate high-quality instruction data that do not rely on closed-source models. Our exploration includes an investigation of various existing instruction generation methods, culminating in the integration of the most efficient variant with two novel strategies to enhance the quality further. Evaluation results from two benchmarks and the GPT-4 model demonstrate the effectiveness of our generated instruction data, which can outperform Alpaca, a method reliant on closed-source models. We hope that more progress can be achieved in generating high-quality instruction data without using closed-source models.

This paper surveys research works in the quickly advancing field of instruction tuning (IT), a crucial technique to enhance the capabilities and controllability of large language models (LLMs). Instruction tuning refers to the process of further training LLMs on a dataset consisting of (instruction, output) pairs in a supervised fashion, which bridges the gap between the next-word prediction objective of LLMs and the users' objective of having LLMs adhere to human instructions. In this work, we make a systematic review of the literature, including the general methodology of IT, the construction of IT datasets, the training of IT models, and applications to different modalities, domains and applications, along with an analysis on aspects that influence the outcome of IT (e.g., generation of instruction outputs, size of the instruction dataset, etc). We also review the potential pitfalls of IT along with criticism against it, along with efforts pointing out current deficiencies of existing strategies and suggest some avenues for fruitful research.

Instruction tuning has emerged as the key in aligning large language models (LLMs) with specific task instructions, thereby mitigating the discrepancy between the next-token prediction objective and users' actual goals. To reduce the labor and time cost to collect or annotate data by humans, researchers start to explore the use of LLMs to generate instruction-aligned synthetic data. Recent works focus on generating diverse instructions and applying LLM to increase instruction complexity, often neglecting downstream use cases. It remains unclear how to tailor high-quality data to elicit better instruction-following abilities in different target instruction distributions and LLMs. To this end, we introduce CodecLM, a general framework for adaptively generating high-quality synthetic data for LLM alignment with different downstream instruction distributions and LLMs. Drawing on the Encode-Decode principles, we use LLMs as codecs to guide the data generation process. We first encode seed instructions into metadata, which are concise keywords generated on-the-fly to capture the target instruction distribution, and then decode metadata to create tailored instructions. We also introduce Self-Rubrics and Contrastive Filtering during decoding to tailor data-efficient samples. Extensive experiments on four open-domain instruction following benchmarks validate the effectiveness of CodecLM over the current state-of-the-arts.

Instruction tuning enhances large language models (LLMs) to follow human instructions across diverse tasks, relying on high-quality datasets to guide behavior. However, these datasets, whether manually curated or synthetically generated, are often narrowly focused and misaligned with the broad distributions captured during pre-training, limiting LLM generalization and effective use of pre-trained knowledge. We propose Aligning Instruction Tuning with Pre-training (AITP), a method that bridges this gap by identifying coverage shortfalls in instruction-tuning datasets and rewriting underrepresented pre-training data into high-quality instruction-response pairs. This approach enriches dataset diversity while preserving task-specific objectives. Evaluations on three fully open LLMs across eight benchmarks demonstrate consistent performance improvements with AITP. Ablations highlight the benefits of adaptive data selection, controlled rewriting, and balanced integration, emphasizing the importance of aligning instruction tuning with pre-training distributions to unlock the full potential of LLMs.

Instruction tuning -- fine-tuning a large language model (LLM) on pairs of instructions and desired outcomes -- is an approach that enables pre-trained language models to perform real-world tasks and follow human instructions. Its practical success depends on the model learning a broader set of instructions than those it was trained on. Yet the factors that determine model generalization to such unseen tasks are not well understood. %To understand the driving factors of generalization, In this paper, we experiment with string rewrites, a symbolic task that serves as a building block for Turing complete Markov algorithms while allowing experimental control of "inputs" and "instructions". We investigate the trade-off between the number of instructions the model is trained on and the number of training samples provided for each instruction and observe that the diversity of the instruction set determines generalization. Generalization emerges once a diverse enough set of tasks is provided, even though very few examples are provided for each task. Instruction diversity also ensures robustness with respect to non-uniform distributions of instructions in the training set.

Instruction tuning is a standard technique employed to align large language models to end tasks and user preferences after the initial pretraining phase. Recent research indicates the critical role of data engineering in instruction tuning -- when appropriately selected, only limited data is necessary to achieve superior performance. However, we still lack a principled understanding of what makes good instruction tuning data for alignment, and how we should select data automatically and effectively. In this work, we delve deeply into automatic data selection strategies for alignment. We start with controlled studies to measure data across three dimensions: complexity, quality, and diversity, along which we examine existing methods and introduce novel techniques for enhanced data measurement. Subsequently, we propose a simple strategy to select data samples based on the measurement. We present deita (short for Data-Efficient Instruction Tuning for Alignment), a series of models fine-tuned from LLaMA and Mistral models using data samples automatically selected with our proposed approach. Empirically, deita performs better or on par with the state-of-the-art open-source alignment models with only 6K SFT training data samples -- over 10x less than the data used in the baselines. When further trained with direct preference optimization (DPO), deita-Mistral-7B + DPO trained with 6K SFT and 10K DPO samples achieve 7.55 MT-Bench and 90.06% AlpacaEval scores. We anticipate this work to provide tools on automatic data selection, facilitating data-efficient alignment. We release our models as well as the selected datasets for future researches to effectively align models more efficiently.

Finetuning large language models with a variety of instruction-response pairs has enhanced their capability to understand and follow instructions. Current instruction tuning primarily relies on teacher models or human intervention to generate and refine the instructions and responses, which are costly, non-sustainable, and may lack diversity. In this paper, we introduce Mosaic Instruction Tuning (Mosaic-IT), a human/model-free method that can efficiently create rich and diverse augmentations from existing instruction tuning data to enhance the finetuned LLM.Mosaic-IT randomly concatenates multiple instruction data into one and trains the model to produce the corresponding responses with predefined higher-level meta-instructions to strengthen its multi-step instruction-following and format-following skills. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate a superior performance and training efficiency of Mosaic-IT, which achieves consistent performance improvements over various benchmarks and an 80% reduction in training costs compared with original instruction tuning. Our codes and data are available at https://github.com/tianyi-lab/Mosaic-IT.

Instruction tuning, a specialized technique to enhance large language model (LLM) performance via instruction datasets, relies heavily on the quality of employed data. Existing quality improvement methods alter instruction data through dataset expansion or curation. However, the expansion method risks data redundancy, potentially compromising LLM performance, while the curation approach confines the LLM's potential to the original dataset. Our aim is to surpass the original data quality without encountering these shortcomings. To achieve this, we propose LIFT (LLM Instruction Fusion Transfer), a novel and versatile paradigm designed to elevate the instruction quality to new heights. LIFT strategically broadens data distribution to encompass more high-quality subspaces and eliminates redundancy, concentrating on high-quality segments across overall data subspaces. Experimental results demonstrate that, even with a limited quantity of high-quality instruction data selected by our paradigm, LLMs not only consistently uphold robust performance across various tasks but also surpass some state-of-the-art results, highlighting the significant improvement in instruction quality achieved by our paradigm.

From the perspective of content safety issues, alignment has shown to limit large language models' (LLMs) harmful content generation. This intentional method of reinforcing models to not respond to certain user inputs seem to be present in many modern open-source instruction tuning datasets such as OpenAssistant or Guanaco. We introduce a novel insight to an instruction-tuned model's performance affected by the presence of alignment in supervised fine-tuning dataset. To be specific, we noticed that alignment acts as if it is poisoning the instruction dataset. Experimentally, we demonstrate that aligned answers significantly worsen the performance of the resulting fine-tuned model's on various reasoning benchmarks such as Big Bench (BBH), Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU), Human Eval, and Discrete Reasoning Over Paragraphs (DROP), performing worse than the counterpart tuned without alignment by 4-33%.

In recent years, instruction tuning has gained increasing attention and emerged as a crucial technique to enhance the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). To construct high-quality instruction datasets, many instruction processing approaches have been proposed, aiming to achieve a delicate balance between data quantity and data quality. Nevertheless, due to inconsistencies that persist among various instruction processing methods, there is no standard open-source instruction processing implementation framework available for the community, which hinders practitioners from further developing and advancing. To facilitate instruction processing research and development, we present EasyInstruct, an easy-to-use instruction processing framework for LLMs, which modularizes instruction generation, selection, and prompting, while also considering their combination and interaction. EasyInstruct is publicly released and actively maintained at https://github.com/zjunlp/EasyInstruct, along with a running demo App at https://huggingface.co/spaces/zjunlp/EasyInstruct for quick-start, calling for broader research centered on instruction data.

Instruction tuning commonly means finetuning a language model on instruction-response pairs. We discover two forms of adaptation (tuning) that are deficient compared to instruction tuning, yet still yield instruction following; we call this implicit instruction tuning. We first find that instruction-response pairs are not necessary: training solely on responses, without any corresponding instructions, yields instruction following. This suggests pretrained models have an instruction-response mapping which is revealed by teaching the model the desired distribution of responses. However, we then find it's not necessary to teach the desired distribution of responses: instruction-response training on narrow-domain data like poetry still leads to broad instruction-following behavior like recipe generation. In particular, when instructions are very different from those in the narrow finetuning domain, models' responses do not adhere to the style of the finetuning domain. To begin to explain implicit instruction tuning, we hypothesize that very simple changes to a language model's distribution yield instruction following. We support this by hand-writing a rule-based language model which yields instruction following in a product-of-experts with a pretrained model. The rules are to slowly increase the probability of ending the sequence, penalize repetition, and uniformly change 15 words' probabilities. In summary, adaptations made without being designed to yield instruction following can do so implicitly.

Instruction tuning has been attracting much attention to achieve generalization ability across a wide variety of tasks. Although various types of instructions have been manually created for instruction tuning, it is still unclear what kind of instruction is optimal to obtain cross-task generalization ability. This work presents instruction optimization, which optimizes training instructions with respect to generalization ability. Rather than manually tuning instructions, we introduce learnable instructions and optimize them with gradient descent by leveraging bilevel optimization. Experimental results show that the learned instruction enhances the diversity of instructions and improves the generalization ability compared to using only manually created instructions.

Instruction tuning plays a critical role in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preference. Despite the vast amount of open instruction datasets, naively training a LLM on all existing instructions may not be optimal and practical. To pinpoint the most beneficial datapoints, data assessment and selection methods have been proposed in the fields of natural language processing (NLP) and deep learning. However, under the context of instruction tuning, there still exists a gap in knowledge on what kind of data evaluation metrics can be employed and how they can be integrated into the selection mechanism. To bridge this gap, we present a comprehensive review on existing literature of data assessment and selection especially for instruction tuning of LLMs. We systematically categorize all applicable methods into quality-based, diversity-based, and importance-based ones where a unified, fine-grained taxonomy is structured. For each category, representative methods are elaborated to describe the landscape of relevant research. In addition, comparison between latest methods is conducted on their officially reported results to provide in-depth discussions on their limitations. Finally, we summarize the open challenges and propose the promosing avenues for future studies. All related contents are available at https://github.com/yuleiqin/fantastic-data-engineering.

Instruction tuning, a new learning paradigm that fine-tunes pre-trained language models on tasks specified through instructions, has shown promising zero-shot performance on various natural language processing tasks. However, it has yet to be explored for vision and multimodal tasks. In this work, we introduce MUL-TIINSTRUCT, the first multimodal instruction tuning benchmark dataset that consists of 62 diverse multimodal tasks in a unified seq-to-seq format covering 10 broad categories. The tasks are derived from 21 existing open-source datasets and each task is equipped with 5 expert-written instructions. We take OFA as the base pre-trained model for multimodal instruction tuning, and to further improve its zero-shot performance, we explore multiple transfer learning strategies to leverage the large-scale NATURAL INSTRUCTIONS dataset. Experimental results demonstrate strong zero-shot performance on various unseen multimodal tasks and the benefit of transfer learning from a text-only instruction dataset. We also design a new evaluation metric - Sensitivity, to evaluate how sensitive the model is to the variety of instructions. Our results indicate that fine-tuning the model on a diverse set of tasks and instructions leads to a reduced sensitivity to variations in instructions for each task.

Recent work has shown that fine-tuning large pre-trained language models on a collection of tasks described via instructions, a.k.a. instruction-tuning, improves their zero and few-shot generalization to unseen tasks. However, there is a limited understanding of the performance trade-offs of different decisions made during the instruction-tuning process. These decisions include the scale and diversity of the instruction-tuning benchmark, different task sampling strategies, fine-tuning with and without demonstrations, training using specialized datasets for reasoning and dialogue, and finally, the fine-tuning objectives themselves. In this paper, we characterize the effect of instruction-tuning decisions on downstream task performance when scaling both model and benchmark sizes. To this end, we create OPT-IML Bench: a large benchmark for Instruction Meta-Learning (IML) of 2000 NLP tasks consolidated into task categories from 8 existing benchmarks, and prepare an evaluation framework to measure three types of model generalizations: to tasks from fully held-out categories, to held-out tasks from seen categories, and to held-out instances from seen tasks. Through the lens of this framework, we first present insights about instruction-tuning decisions as applied to OPT-30B and further exploit these insights to train OPT-IML 30B and 175B, which are instruction-tuned versions of OPT. OPT-IML demonstrates all three generalization abilities at both scales on four different evaluation benchmarks with diverse tasks and input formats -- PromptSource, FLAN, Super-NaturalInstructions, and UnifiedSKG. Not only does it significantly outperform OPT on all benchmarks but is also highly competitive with existing models fine-tuned on each specific benchmark. We release OPT-IML at both scales, together with the OPT-IML Bench evaluation framework.

Instruction fine-tuning has recently emerged as a promising approach for improving the zero-shot capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) on new tasks. This technique has shown particular strength in improving the performance of modestly sized LLMs, sometimes inducing performance competitive with much larger model variants. In this paper we ask two questions: (1) How sensitive are instruction-tuned models to the particular phrasings of instructions, and, (2) How can we make them more robust to such natural language variation? To answer the former, we collect a set of 319 instructions manually written by NLP practitioners for over 80 unique tasks included in widely used benchmarks, and we evaluate the variance and average performance of these instructions as compared to instruction phrasings observed during instruction fine-tuning. We find that using novel (unobserved) but appropriate instruction phrasings consistently degrades model performance, sometimes substantially so. Further, such natural instructions yield a wide variance in downstream performance, despite their semantic equivalence. Put another way, instruction-tuned models are not especially robust to instruction re-phrasings. We propose a simple method to mitigate this issue by introducing ``soft prompt'' embedding parameters and optimizing these to maximize the similarity between representations of semantically equivalent instructions. We show that this method consistently improves the robustness of instruction-tuned models.

Instruction-tuning can be substantially optimized through enhanced diversity, resulting in models capable of handling a broader spectrum of tasks. However, existing data employed for such tuning often exhibit an inadequate coverage of individual domains, limiting the scope for nuanced comprehension and interactions within these areas. To address this deficiency, we propose Explore-Instruct, a novel approach to enhance the data coverage to be used in domain-specific instruction-tuning through active exploration via Large Language Models (LLMs). Built upon representative domain use cases, Explore-Instruct explores a multitude of variations or possibilities by implementing a search algorithm to obtain diversified and domain-focused instruction-tuning data. Our data-centric analysis validates the effectiveness of this proposed approach in improving domain-specific instruction coverage. Moreover, our model's performance demonstrates considerable advancements over multiple baselines, including those utilizing domain-specific data enhancement. Our findings offer a promising opportunity to improve instruction coverage, especially in domain-specific contexts, thereby advancing the development of adaptable language models. Our code, model weights, and data are public at https://github.com/fanqiwan/Explore-Instruct.

Instruction tuning is essential for large language models (LLMs) to become interactive. While many instruction tuning datasets exist in English, there is a noticeable lack in other languages. Also, their effectiveness has not been well verified in non-English languages. We construct a Japanese instruction dataset by expanding and filtering existing datasets and apply the dataset to a Japanese pre-trained base model. We performed Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) tuning on both Japanese and English existing models using our instruction dataset. We evaluated these models from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives. As a result, the effectiveness of Japanese instruction datasets is confirmed. The results also indicate that even with relatively small LLMs, performances in downstream tasks would be improved through instruction tuning. Our instruction dataset, tuned models, and implementation are publicly available online.

Instruction tuning is an important step in making language models useful for direct user interaction. However, many legal tasks remain out of reach for most open LLMs and there do not yet exist any large scale instruction datasets for the domain. This critically limits research in this application area. In this work, we curate LawInstruct, a large legal instruction dataset, covering 17 jurisdictions, 24 languages and a total of 12M examples. We present evidence that domain-specific pretraining and instruction tuning improve performance on LegalBench, including improving Flan-T5 XL by 8 points or 16\% over the baseline. However, the effect does not generalize across all tasks, training regimes, model sizes, and other factors. LawInstruct is a resource for accelerating the development of models with stronger information processing and decision making capabilities in the legal domain.

Instruction tuning has significantly advanced large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, enabling them to align with human instructions across diverse tasks. However, progress in open vision-language models (VLMs) has been limited due to the scarcity of high-quality instruction datasets. To tackle this challenge and promote research in the vision-language field, we introduce the Multi-Modal, Multilingual Instruction Tuning (M^3IT) dataset, designed to optimize VLM alignment with human instructions. Our M^3IT dataset comprises 40 carefully curated datasets, including 2.4 million instances and 400 manually written task instructions, reformatted into a vision-to-text structure. Key tasks are translated into 80 languages with an advanced translation system, ensuring broader accessibility. M^3IT surpasses previous datasets regarding task coverage, instruction number and instance scale. Moreover, we develop Ying-VLM, a VLM model trained on our M^3IT dataset, showcasing its potential to answer complex questions requiring world knowledge, generalize to unseen video tasks, and comprehend unseen instructions in Chinese. To encourage further research, we have open-sourced both the dataset and trained models.

Instruction tuning has been widely used to unleash the complete potential of large language models. Notably, complex and diverse instructions are of significant importance as they can effectively align models with various downstream tasks. However, current approaches to constructing large-scale instructions predominantly favour powerful models such as GPT-4 or those with over 70 billion parameters, under the empirical presumption that such larger language models (LLMs) inherently possess enhanced capabilities. In this study, we question this prevalent assumption and conduct an in-depth exploration into the potential of smaller language models (SLMs) in the context of instruction evolution. Extensive experiments across three scenarios of instruction evolution reveal that smaller language models (SLMs) can synthesize more effective instructions than LLMs. Further analysis demonstrates that SLMs possess a broader output space during instruction evolution, resulting in more complex and diverse variants. We also observe that the existing metrics fail to focus on the impact of the instructions. Thus, we propose Instruction Complex-Aware IFD (IC-IFD), which introduces instruction complexity in the original IFD score to evaluate the effectiveness of instruction data more accurately. Our source code is available at: https://github.com/HypherX/Evolution-Analysis{https://github.com/HypherX/Evolution-Analysis}

Instruction tuning is a vital step of training large language models (LLM), so how to enhance the effect of instruction tuning has received increased attention. Existing works indicate that the quality of the dataset is more crucial than the quantity during instruction tuning of LLM. Therefore, recently a lot of studies focus on exploring the methods of selecting high-quality subset from instruction datasets, aiming to reduce training costs and enhance the instruction-following capabilities of LLMs. This paper presents a comprehensive survey on data selection for LLM instruction tuning. Firstly, we introduce the wildly used instruction datasets. Then, we propose a new taxonomy of the data selection methods and provide a detailed introduction of recent advances,and the evaluation strategies and results of data selection methods are also elaborated in detail. Finally, we emphasize the open challenges and present new frontiers of this task.

Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) is a neural architecture design that can be utilized to add learnable parameters to Large Language Models (LLMs) without increasing inference cost. Instruction tuning is a technique for training LLMs to follow instructions. We advocate combining these two approaches, as we find that MoE models benefit more from instruction tuning than dense models. In particular, we conduct empirical studies across three experimental setups: (i) Direct finetuning on individual downstream tasks devoid of instruction tuning; (ii) Instructiontuning followed by in-context few-shot or zero-shot generalization on downstream tasks; and (iii) Instruction tuning supplemented by further finetuning on individual downstream tasks. In the first scenario, MoE models overall underperform dense models of identical computational capacity. This narrative, however, dramatically changes with the introduction of instruction tuning (second and third scenario), used independently or in conjunction with task-specific finetuning. Our most powerful model, FLAN-MOE-32B, surpasses the performance of FLAN-PALM-62B on four benchmark tasks, while using only a third of the FLOPs. The advancements embodied byFLAN-MOE inspire a reevaluation of the design principles of large-scale, high-performance language models in the framework of task-agnostic learning.

Instruction tuning for large language models (LLMs) has gained attention from researchers due to its ability to unlock the potential of LLMs in following instructions. While instruction tuning offers advantages for facilitating the adaptation of large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks as a fine-tuning approach, training models with tens of millions or even billions of parameters on large amounts of data results in unaffordable computational costs. To address this, we focus on reducing the data used in LLM instruction tuning to decrease training costs and improve data efficiency, dubbed as Low Training Data Instruction Tuning (LTD Instruction Tuning). Specifically, this paper conducts a preliminary exploration into reducing the data used in LLM training and identifies several observations regarding task specialization for LLM training, such as the optimization of performance for a specific task, the number of instruction types required for instruction tuning, and the amount of data required for task-specific models. The results suggest that task-specific models can be trained using less than 0.5% of the original dataset, with a 2% improvement in performance over those trained on full task-related data.

We study the design decisions of publicly available instruction tuning methods, and break down the development of Flan 2022 (Chung et al., 2022). Through careful ablation studies on the Flan Collection of tasks and methods, we tease apart the effect of design decisions which enable Flan-T5 to outperform prior work by 3-17%+ across evaluation settings. We find task balancing and enrichment techniques are overlooked but critical to effective instruction tuning, and in particular, training with mixed prompt settings (zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought) actually yields stronger (2%+) performance in all settings. In further experiments, we show Flan-T5 requires less finetuning to converge higher and faster than T5 on single downstream tasks, motivating instruction-tuned models as more computationally-efficient starting checkpoints for new tasks. Finally, to accelerate research on instruction tuning, we make the Flan 2022 collection of datasets, templates, and methods publicly available at https://github.com/google-research/FLAN/tree/main/flan/v2.

Instruction tuning enables language models to generalize more effectively and better follow user intent. However, obtaining instruction data can be costly and challenging. Prior works employ methods such as expensive human annotation, crowd-sourced datasets with alignment issues, or generating noisy examples via LLMs. We introduce the LongForm dataset, which is created by leveraging English corpus examples with augmented instructions. We select a diverse set of human-written documents from existing corpora such as C4 and Wikipedia and generate instructions for the given documents via LLMs. This approach provides a cheaper and cleaner instruction-tuning dataset and one suitable for long text generation. We finetune T5, OPT, and LLaMA models on our dataset and show that even smaller LongForm models have good generalization capabilities for text generation. Our models outperform 10x larger language models without instruction tuning on various tasks such as story/recipe generation and long-form question answering. Moreover, LongForm models outperform prior instruction-tuned models such as FLAN-T5 and Alpaca by a large margin. Finally, our models can effectively follow and answer multilingual instructions; we demonstrate this for news generation. We publicly release our data and models: https://github.com/akoksal/LongForm.

Instruction tuning has recently been recognized as an effective way of aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance their generalization ability across various tasks. However, when tuning publicly accessible, centralized LLMs with private instruction data, privacy concerns are inevitable. While direct transfer of parameterized modules between models is a plausible approach to address this, its implications and effectiveness need further exploration. This paper focuses on Offsite-Tuning (OFT), a representative technique that transfers transformer blocks between centralized LLMs and downstream emulators. Given the limited understanding of the underlying mechanism of OFT, we perform an empirical analysis on LLMs from the perspectives of representation and functional similarity. Interestingly, our findings reveal a unique modular structure within the layers of LLMs that appears to emerge as the model size expands. Simultaneously, we note subtle but potentially significant changes in representation and intermediate predictions across the layers. Inspired by these observations, we propose CRaSh, involving Clustering, Removing, and Sharing, a training-free strategy to derive improved emulators from LLMs. CRaSh significantly boosts performance of OFT with billions of parameters. Furthermore, we investigate the optimal solutions yielded by fine-tuning with and without full model through the lens of loss landscape. Our findings demonstrate a linear connectivity among these optima falling over the same basin, thereby highlighting the effectiveness of CRaSh and OFT. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/TsinghuaC3I/CRaSh.

We study the code generation behavior of instruction-tuned models built on top of code pre-trained language models when they could access an auxiliary function to implement a function. We design several ways to provide auxiliary functions to the models by adding them to the query or providing a response prefix to incorporate the ability to utilize auxiliary functions with the instruction-following capability. Our experimental results show the effectiveness of combining the base models' auxiliary function utilization ability with the instruction following ability. In particular, the performance of adopting our approaches with the open-sourced language models surpasses that of the recent powerful proprietary language models, i.e., gpt-4o.

Instruction tuning is widely recognized as a key technique for building generalist language models, which comes to the attention of researchers and the public with the release of InstructGPT ouyang2022training and ChatGPT [ https://chat.openai.com/ ]. Despite impressive progress in English-oriented large-scale language models (LLMs), it is still under-explored whether English-based foundation LLMs can perform similarly on multilingual tasks compared to English tasks with well-designed instruction tuning and how we can construct the corpora needed for the tuning. To remedy this gap, we propose the project as an attempt to create a Chinese instruction dataset by various methods adapted to the intrinsic characteristics of 4 sub-tasks. We collect around 200k Chinese instruction tuning samples, which have been manually checked to guarantee high quality. We also summarize the existing English and Chinese instruction corpora and brief some potential applications of the newly constructed Chinese instruction corpora.

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized numerous domains with their impressive performance but still face their challenges. A predominant issue is the propensity for these models to generate non-existent facts, a concern termed hallucination. Our research is motivated by the observation that previous instruction tuning methods force the model to complete a sentence no matter whether the model knows the knowledge or not. When the question is out of the parametric knowledge, it will try to make up something and fail to indicate when it lacks knowledge. In this paper, we present a new approach called Refusal-Aware Instruction Tuning (R-Tuning). This approach is formalized by first identifying the knowledge gap between parametric knowledge and the instruction tuning data. Then, we construct the refusal-aware data based on the knowledge intersection, to tune LLMs to refrain from responding to questions beyond its parametric knowledge. Experimental results demonstrate this new instruction tuning approach effectively improves a model's ability to answer known questions and refrain from answering unknown questions. Furthermore, when tested on out-of-domain datasets, the refusal ability was found to be a meta-skill that could be generalized to other tasks. Further analysis surprisingly finds that learning the uncertainty during training displays a better ability to estimate uncertainty than uncertainty-based testing. Our code will be released at https://github.com/shizhediao/R-Tuning.

Instruction tuning has been used as a promising approach to improve the performance of large language models (LLMs) on unseen tasks. However, current LLMs exhibit limited robustness to unseen instructions, generating inconsistent outputs when the same instruction is phrased with slightly varied forms or language styles. This behavior indicates LLMs' lack of robustness to textual variations and generalizability to unseen instructions, potentially leading to trustworthiness issues. Accordingly, we propose Contrastive Instruction Tuning, which maximizes the similarity between the hidden representations of semantically equivalent instruction-instance pairs while minimizing the similarity between semantically different ones. To facilitate this approach, we augment the existing FLAN collection by paraphrasing task instructions. Experiments on the PromptBench benchmark show that CoIN consistently improves LLMs' robustness to unseen instructions with variations across character, word, sentence, and semantic levels by an average of +2.5% in accuracy.

Instruction tuning has emerged as a promising approach to enhancing large language models in following human instructions. It is shown that increasing the diversity and number of instructions in the training data can consistently enhance generalization performance, which facilitates a recent endeavor to collect various instructions and integrate existing instruction tuning datasets into larger collections. However, different users have their unique ways of expressing instructions, and there often exist variations across different datasets in the instruction styles and formats, i.e., format inconsistency. In this work, we study how format inconsistency may impact the performance of instruction tuning. We propose a framework called "Unified Instruction Tuning" (UIT), which calls OpenAI APIs for automatic format transfer among different instruction tuning datasets. We show that UIT successfully improves the generalization performance on unseen instructions, which highlights the importance of format consistency for instruction tuning. To make the UIT framework more practical, we further propose a novel perplexity-based denoising method to reduce the noise of automatic format transfer. We also train a smaller offline model that achieves comparable format transfer capability than OpenAI APIs to reduce costs in practice.

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated excellent performance in understanding human instructions and generating code, which has inspired researchers to explore the feasibility of generating RTL code with LLMs. However, the existing approaches to fine-tune LLMs on RTL codes typically are conducted on fixed datasets, which do not fully stimulate the capability of LLMs and require large amounts of reference data. To mitigate these issues , we introduce a simple yet effective iterative training paradigm named ITERTL. During each iteration, samples are drawn from the model trained in the previous cycle. Then these new samples are employed for training in this loop. Through this iterative approach, the distribution mismatch between the model and the training samples is reduced. Additionally, the model is thus enabled to explore a broader generative space and receive more comprehensive feedback. Theoretical analyses are conducted to investigate the mechanism of the effectiveness. Experimental results show the model trained through our proposed approach can compete with and even outperform the state-of-the-art (SOTA) open-source model with nearly 37\% reference samples, achieving remarkable 42.9\% and 62.2\% pass@1 rate on two VerilogEval evaluation datasets respectively. While using the same amount of reference samples, our method can achieved a relative improvement of 16.9\% and 12.5\% in pass@1 compared to the non-iterative method. This study facilitates the application of LLMs for generating RTL code in practical scenarios with limited data.

Instruction tuning is an emergent paradigm in NLP wherein natural language instructions are leveraged with language models to induce zero-shot performance on unseen tasks. Instructions have been shown to enable good performance on unseen tasks and datasets in both large and small language models. Dialogue is an especially interesting area to explore instruction tuning because dialogue systems perform multiple kinds of tasks related to language (e.g., natural language understanding and generation, domain-specific interaction), yet instruction tuning has not been systematically explored for dialogue-related tasks. We introduce InstructDial, an instruction tuning framework for dialogue, which consists of a repository of 48 diverse dialogue tasks in a unified text-to-text format created from 59 openly available dialogue datasets. Next, we explore cross-task generalization ability on models tuned on InstructDial across diverse dialogue tasks. Our analysis reveals that InstructDial enables good zero-shot performance on unseen datasets and tasks such as dialogue evaluation and intent detection, and even better performance in a few-shot setting. To ensure that models adhere to instructions, we introduce novel meta-tasks. We establish benchmark zero-shot and few-shot performance of models trained using the proposed framework on multiple dialogue tasks.

Instruction tuning has emerged as a key step in aligning large language models. One of the central challenges of instruction tuning is dataset selection, as the composition of the instruction tuning dataset can significantly impact downstream performance. In particular, researchers have hypothesized that dataset diversity and dataset quality are important indicators of downstream performance. However, it is not clear how to automatically select high quality and diverse data or how exactly quality and diversity affect instruction following ability. To resolve these issues, we propose a new algorithm, Quality-Diversity Instruction Tuning (QDIT). QDIT provides a principled algorithm to control dataset diversity and quality, allowing us to conduct an in depth study on the effect of diversity and quality on instruction tuning performance. From this study we draw two key insights (1) there is a natural tradeoff between dataset diversity and quality and (2) increasing dataset diversity significantly improves the worst case instruction following performance, therefore improving robustness. We validate the performance of QDIT on several large scale instruction tuning datasets, where we find it can improve worst case performance by 18% while maintaining or improving average performance compared to quality driven baselines.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased impressive capabilities in handling straightforward programming tasks. However, their performance tends to falter when confronted with more challenging programming problems. We observe that conventional models often generate solutions as monolithic code blocks, restricting their effectiveness in tackling intricate questions. To overcome this limitation, we present Modular-of-Thought Coder (MoTCoder). We introduce a pioneering framework for MoT instruction tuning, designed to promote the decomposition of tasks into logical sub-tasks and sub-modules. Our investigations reveal that, through the cultivation and utilization of sub-modules, MoTCoder significantly improves both the modularity and correctness of the generated solutions, leading to substantial relative pass@1 improvements of 12.9% on APPS and 9.43% on CodeContests. Our codes are available at https://github.com/dvlab-research/MoTCoder.

Instruction tuning plays a crucial role in shaping the outputs of language models (LMs) to desired styles. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective method, Instruction Modelling (IM), which trains LMs by applying a loss function to the instruction and prompt part rather than solely to the output part. Through experiments across 21 diverse benchmarks, we show that, in many scenarios, IM can effectively improve the LM performance on both NLP tasks (e.g., MMLU, TruthfulQA, and HumanEval) and open-ended generation benchmarks (e.g., MT-Bench and AlpacaEval). Remarkably, in the most advantageous case, IM boosts model performance on AlpacaEval 1.0 by over 100%. We identify two key factors influencing the effectiveness of IM: (1) The ratio between instruction length and output length in the training data; and (2) The number of training examples. We observe that IM is especially beneficial when trained on datasets with lengthy instructions paired with brief outputs, or under the Superficial Alignment Hypothesis (SAH) where a small amount of training examples are used for instruction tuning. Further analysis substantiates our hypothesis that the improvement can be attributed to reduced overfitting to instruction tuning datasets. Our work provides practical guidance for instruction tuning LMs, especially in low-resource scenarios.

Instruction tuning is critical to large language models (LLMs) for achieving better instruction following and task adaptation capabilities but its success heavily relies on the training data quality. Many recent methods focus on improving the data quality but often overlook the compatibility of the data with the student model being finetuned. This paper introduces Selective Reflection-Tuning, a novel paradigm that synergizes a teacher LLM's reflection and introspection for improving existing data quality with the data selection capability of the student LLM, to automatically refine existing instruction-tuning data. This teacher-student collaboration produces high-quality and student-compatible instruction-response pairs, resulting in sample-efficient instruction tuning and LLMs of superior performance. Selective Reflection-Tuning is a data augmentation and synthesis that generally improves LLM finetuning and self-improvement without collecting brand-new data. We apply our method to Alpaca and WizardLM data and achieve much stronger and top-tier 7B and 13B LLMs.

Code editing encompasses a variety of pragmatic tasks that developers deal with daily. Despite its relevance and practical usefulness, automatic code editing remains an underexplored area in the evolution of deep learning models, partly due to data scarcity. In this work, we explore the use of large language models (LLMs) to edit code based on user instructions, covering a broad range of implicit tasks such as comment insertion, code optimization, and code refactoring. To facilitate this, we introduce InstructCoder, the first dataset designed to adapt LLMs for general-purpose code editing, containing highdiversity code-editing tasks. It consists of over 114,000 instruction-input-output triplets and covers multiple distinct code editing scenarios. The dataset is systematically expanded through an iterative process that commences with code editing data sourced from GitHub commits as seed tasks. Seed and generated tasks are used subsequently to prompt ChatGPT for more task data. Our experiments demonstrate that open-source LLMs fine-tuned on InstructCoder can edit code correctly based on users' instructions most of the time, exhibiting unprecedented code-editing performance levels. Such results suggest that proficient instruction-finetuning can lead to significant amelioration in code editing abilities. The dataset and the source code are available at https://github.com/qishenghu/CodeInstruct.

Since the release of T\"ULU [Wang et al., 2023b], open resources for instruction tuning have developed quickly, from better base models to new finetuning techniques. We test and incorporate a number of these advances into T\"ULU, resulting in T\"ULU 2, a suite of improved T\"ULU models for advancing the understanding and best practices of adapting pretrained language models to downstream tasks and user preferences. Concretely, we release: (1) T\"ULU-V2-mix, an improved collection of high-quality instruction datasets; (2) T\"ULU 2, LLAMA-2 models finetuned on the V2 mixture; (3) T\"ULU 2+DPO, T\"ULU 2 models trained with direct preference optimization (DPO), including the largest DPO-trained model to date (T\"ULU 2+DPO 70B); (4) CODE T\"ULU 2, CODE LLAMA models finetuned on our V2 mix that outperform CODE LLAMA and its instruction-tuned variant, CODE LLAMA-Instruct. Our evaluation from multiple perspectives shows that the T\"ULU 2 suite achieves state-of-the-art performance among open models and matches or exceeds the performance of GPT-3.5-turbo-0301 on several benchmarks. We release all the checkpoints, data, training and evaluation code to facilitate future open efforts on adapting large language models.

We explore the novel application of Large Language Models to code optimization. We present a 7B-parameter transformer model trained from scratch to optimize LLVM assembly for code size. The model takes as input unoptimized assembly and outputs a list of compiler options to best optimize the program. Crucially, during training, we ask the model to predict the instruction counts before and after optimization, and the optimized code itself. These auxiliary learning tasks significantly improve the optimization performance of the model and improve the model's depth of understanding. We evaluate on a large suite of test programs. Our approach achieves a 3.0% improvement in reducing instruction counts over the compiler, outperforming two state-of-the-art baselines that require thousands of compilations. Furthermore, the model shows surprisingly strong code reasoning abilities, generating compilable code 91% of the time and perfectly emulating the output of the compiler 70% of the time.

Optimizing scientific software is a difficult task because codebases are often large and complex, and performance can depend upon several factors including the algorithm, its implementation, and hardware among others. Causes of poor performance can originate from disparate sources and be difficult to diagnose. Recent years have seen a multitude of work that use large language models (LLMs) to assist in software development tasks. However, these tools are trained to model the distribution of code as text, and are not specifically designed to understand performance aspects of code. In this work, we introduce a reinforcement learning based methodology to align the outputs of code LLMs with performance. This allows us to build upon the current code modeling capabilities of LLMs and extend them to generate better performing code. We demonstrate that our fine-tuned model improves the expected speedup of generated code over base models for a set of benchmark tasks from 0.9 to 1.6 for serial code and 1.9 to 4.5 for OpenMP code.

Large Language Models (LLMs) rely on instruction samples for alignment, but creating these datasets poses challenges, particularly in expert-dependent tasks like coding, which can be cost-prohibitive. One approach to mitigate these challenges is synthesizing data using another LLM. In this paper, we introduce a scalable method for generating synthetic instructions to enhance the code generation capability of LLMs. The proposed algorithm, Genetic-Instruct, mimics evolutionary processes, utilizing self-instruction to create numerous synthetic samples from a limited number of seeds. Genetic-Instruct is designed for efficient scaling of the generation process. Fine-tuning multiple coding LLMs with the synthetic samples demonstrates a significant improvement in their code generation accuracy compared to the baselines.

Recent work has shown that prompting language models with code-like representations of natural language leads to performance improvements on structured reasoning tasks. However, such tasks comprise only a small subset of all natural language tasks. In our work, we seek to answer whether or not code-prompting is the preferred way of interacting with language models in general. We compare code and text prompts across three popular GPT models (davinci, code-davinci-002, and text-davinci-002) on a broader selection of tasks (e.g., QA, sentiment, summarization) and find that with few exceptions, code prompts do not consistently outperform text prompts. Furthermore, we show that the style of code prompt has a large effect on performance for some but not all tasks and that fine-tuning on text instructions leads to better relative performance of code prompts.

Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have significantly enhanced video understanding tasks. Instruction tuning (i.e., fine-tuning models on datasets of instructions paired with desired outputs) has been key to improving model performance. However, creating diverse instruction-tuning datasets is challenging due to high annotation costs and the complexity of capturing temporal information in videos. Existing approaches often rely on large language models to generate instruction-output pairs, which can limit diversity and lead to responses that lack grounding in the video content. To address this, we propose VideoSAVi (Self-Aligned Video Language Model), a novel self-training pipeline that enables VLMs to generate their own training data without extensive manual annotation. The process involves three stages: (1) generating diverse video-specific questions, (2) producing multiple candidate answers, and (3) evaluating these responses for alignment with the video content. This self-generated data is then used for direct preference optimization (DPO), allowing the model to refine its own high-quality outputs and improve alignment with video content. Our experiments demonstrate that even smaller models (0.5B and 7B parameters) can effectively use this self-training approach, outperforming previous methods and achieving results comparable to those trained on proprietary preference data. VideoSAVi shows significant improvements across multiple benchmarks: up to 28% on multi-choice QA, 8% on zero-shot open-ended QA, and 12% on temporal reasoning benchmarks. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of our self-training approach in enhancing video understanding while reducing dependence on proprietary models.

Instruction tuning (IT) achieves impressive zero-shot generalization results by training large language models (LLMs) on a massive amount of diverse tasks with instructions. However, how to select new tasks to improve the performance and generalizability of IT models remains an open question. Training on all existing tasks is impractical due to prohibiting computation requirements, and randomly selecting tasks can lead to suboptimal performance. In this work, we propose active instruction tuning based on prompt uncertainty, a novel framework to identify informative tasks, and then actively tune the models on the selected tasks. We represent the informativeness of new tasks with the disagreement of the current model outputs over perturbed prompts. Our experiments on NIV2 and Self-Instruct datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms other baseline strategies for task selection, achieving better out-of-distribution generalization with fewer training tasks. Additionally, we introduce a task map that categorizes and diagnoses tasks based on prompt uncertainty and prediction probability. We discover that training on ambiguous (prompt-uncertain) tasks improves generalization while training on difficult (prompt-certain and low-probability) tasks offers no benefit, underscoring the importance of task selection for instruction tuning.

We introduce Stable Code, the first in our new-generation of code language models series, which serves as a general-purpose base code language model targeting code completion, reasoning, math, and other software engineering-based tasks. Additionally, we introduce an instruction variant named Stable Code Instruct that allows conversing with the model in a natural chat interface for performing question-answering and instruction-based tasks. In this technical report, we detail the data and training procedure leading to both models. Their weights are available via Hugging Face for anyone to download and use at https://huggingface.co/stabilityai/stable-code-3b and https://huggingface.co/stabilityai/stable-code-instruct-3b. This report contains thorough evaluations of the models, including multilingual programming benchmarks, and the MT benchmark focusing on multi-turn dialogues. At the time of its release, Stable Code is the state-of-the-art open model under 3B parameters and even performs comparably to larger models of sizes 7 billion and 15 billion parameters on the popular Multi-PL benchmark. Stable Code Instruct also exhibits state-of-the-art performance on the MT-Bench coding tasks and on Multi-PL completion compared to other instruction tuned models. Given its appealing small size, we also provide throughput measurements on a number of edge devices. In addition, we open source several quantized checkpoints and provide their performance metrics compared to the original model.

While instruction-tuned language models have demonstrated impressive zero-shot generalization, these models often struggle to generate accurate responses when faced with instructions that fall outside their training set. This paper presents Instructive Decoding (ID), a simple yet effective approach that augments the efficacy of instruction-tuned models. Specifically, ID adjusts the logits for next-token prediction in a contrastive manner, utilizing predictions generated from a manipulated version of the original instruction, referred to as a noisy instruction. This noisy instruction aims to elicit responses that could diverge from the intended instruction yet remain plausible. We conduct experiments across a spectrum of such noisy instructions, ranging from those that insert semantic noise via random words to others like 'opposite' that elicit the deviated responses. Our approach achieves considerable performance gains across various instruction-tuned models and tasks without necessitating any additional parameter updates. Notably, utilizing 'opposite' as the noisy instruction in ID, which exhibits the maximum divergence from the original instruction, consistently produces the most significant performance gains across multiple models and tasks.

With the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), the demand for robust instruction-following capabilities in code generation tasks has grown significantly. Code generation not only facilitates faster prototyping and automated testing, but also augments developer efficiency through improved maintainability and reusability of code. In this paper, we introduce CodeIF, the first benchmark specifically designed to assess the abilities of LLMs to adhere to task-oriented instructions within diverse code generation scenarios. CodeIF encompasses a broad range of tasks, including function synthesis, error debugging, algorithmic refactoring, and code explanation, thereby providing a comprehensive suite to evaluate model performance across varying complexity levels and programming domains. We conduct extensive experiments with LLMs, analyzing their strengths and limitations in meeting the demands of these tasks. The experimental results offer valuable insights into how well current models align with human instructions, as well as the extent to which they can generate consistent, maintainable, and contextually relevant code. Our findings not only underscore the critical role that instruction-following LLMs can play in modern software development, but also illuminate pathways for future research aimed at enhancing their adaptability, reliability, and overall effectiveness in automated code generation.

Instruction tuning has unlocked powerful capabilities in large language models (LLMs), effectively using combined datasets to develop generalpurpose chatbots. However, real-world applications often require a specialized suite of skills (e.g., reasoning). The challenge lies in identifying the most relevant data from these extensive datasets to effectively develop specific capabilities, a setting we frame as targeted instruction tuning. We propose LESS, an optimizer-aware and practically efficient algorithm to effectively estimate data influences and perform Low-rank gradiEnt Similarity Search for instruction data selection. Crucially, LESS adapts existing influence formulations to work with the Adam optimizer and variable-length instruction data. LESS first constructs a highly reusable and transferable gradient datastore with low-dimensional gradient features and then selects examples based on their similarity to few-shot examples embodying a specific capability. Experiments show that training on a LESS-selected 5% of the data can often outperform training on the full dataset across diverse downstream tasks. Furthermore, the selected data is highly transferable: smaller models can be leveraged to select useful data for larger models and models from different families. Our qualitative analysis shows that our method goes beyond surface form cues to identify data that exemplifies the necessary reasoning skills for the intended downstream application.

Instruction-tuning language models has become a crucial step in aligning them for general use. Typically, this process involves extensive training on large datasets, incurring high training costs. In this paper, we introduce a novel training data selection based on the learning percentage of the samples. We assert that current language models possess the capability to autonomously select high-quality training data, leading to comparable or improved performance compared to training on the entire dataset. Our experiments span different-sized models, revealing that this characteristic holds for models ranging from 1B (small) to 13B (large) in size. Moreover, we demonstrate an interesting finding that the data hardness transfers across model sizes, and a smaller 350M model can effectively curate high-quality training data with hard samples for a larger 13B model, resulting in an equally or superior instruction-tuned model compared to training on the complete dataset. Utilizing open-sourced OPT and Llama-2 models up to 13B in size, two publicly available instruction-tuning training datasets and evaluated by both automatic metrics & humans, our paper introduces a novel approach to training data selection, showcasing a more efficient alternative.

Instruction tuning has been shown to be able to improve cross-task generalization of language models. However, it is still challenging for language models to complete the target tasks following the instructions, as the instructions are general and lack intermediate steps. To address this problem, we propose to incorporate the step-by-step instructions to help language models to decompose the tasks, which can provide the detailed and specific procedures for completing the target tasks. The step-by-step instructions are obtained automatically by prompting ChatGPT, which are further combined with the original instructions to tune language models. The extensive experiments on SUP-NATINST show that the high-quality step-by-step instructions can improve cross-task generalization across different model sizes. Moreover, the further analysis indicates the importance of the order of steps of the step-by-step instruction for the improvement. To facilitate future research, we release the step-by-step instructions and their human quality evaluation results.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities on a broad spectrum of downstream tasks. Within the realm of software engineering, specialized tasks on code, such as program repair, present unique challenges, necessitating fine-tuning to unlock state-of-the-art performance. Fine-tuning approaches proposed in the literature for LLMs on program repair tasks are however generally overlooking the need to reason about the logic behind code changes, beyond syntactic patterns in the data. High-performing fine-tuning experiments also usually come at very high computational costs. With MORepair, we propose a novel perspective on the learning focus of LLM fine-tuning for program repair: we not only adapt the LLM parameters to the syntactic nuances of the task of code transformation (objective 1), but we also specifically fine-tune the LLM with respect to the logical reason behind the code change in the training data (objective 2). Such a multi-objective fine-tuning will instruct LLMs to generate high-quality patches. We apply MORepair to fine-tune four open-source LLMs with different sizes and architectures. Experimental results on C++ and Java repair benchmarks show that the implemented fine-tuning effectively boosts LLM repair performance by 7.6% to 10% in Top-10 repair suggestions. We further show that our fine-tuning strategy yields superior performance compared to the incumbent state-of-the-art in fine-tuned models for program repair, Fine-tune-CoT and RepairLLaMA.

Instruction tuning enhances large language models (LLMs) by aligning them with human preferences across diverse tasks. Traditional approaches to create instruction tuning datasets face serious challenges for low-resource languages due to their dependence on data annotation. This work introduces a novel method, Multilingual Reverse Instructions (MURI), which generates high-quality instruction tuning datasets for low-resource languages without requiring human annotators or pre-existing multilingual models. Utilizing reverse instructions and a translation pipeline, MURI produces instruction-output pairs from existing human-written texts in low-resource languages. This method ensures cultural relevance and diversity by sourcing texts from different native domains and applying filters to eliminate inappropriate content. Our dataset, MURI-IT, includes more than 2 million instruction-output pairs across 200 languages. Evaluation by native speakers and fine-tuning experiments with mT5 models demonstrate the approach's effectiveness for both NLU and open-ended generation. We publicly release datasets and models at https://github.com/akoksal/muri.

Generating diverse and sophisticated instructions for downstream tasks by Large Language Models (LLMs) is pivotal for advancing the effect. Current approaches leverage closed-source LLMs, employing in-context prompting for instruction generation. However, in this paper, we found that in-context prompting cannot generate complex instructions with length ge 100 for tasks like code completion. To solve this problem, we introduce Ada-Instruct, an adaptive instruction generator developed by fine-tuning open-source LLMs. Our pivotal finding illustrates that fine-tuning open-source LLMs with a mere ten samples generates long instructions that maintain distributional consistency for complex reasoning tasks. We empirically validated Ada-Instruct's efficacy across different applications, including code completion, mathematical reasoning, and commonsense reasoning. The results underscore Ada-Instruct's superiority, evidencing its improvements over its base models, current self-instruct methods, and other state-of-the-art models.

Instruction tuning-supervised fine-tuning using instruction-response pairs-is a foundational step in transitioning pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) into helpful and safe chat assistants. Our hypothesis is that establishing an adequate output space can enable such a transition given the capabilities inherent in pre-trained LLMs. To verify this, we propose Response Tuning (RT), which eliminates the instruction-conditioning step in instruction tuning and solely focuses on response space supervision. Our experiments demonstrate that RT models, trained only using responses, can effectively respond to a wide range of instructions and exhibit helpfulness comparable to that of their instruction-tuned counterparts. Furthermore, we observe that controlling the training response distribution can significantly improve their user preference or elicit target behaviors such as refusing assistance for unsafe queries. Our findings illuminate the role of establishing an adequate output space in alignment, highlighting the potential of the extensive inherent capabilities of pre-trained LLMs.

Instruction tuning has been widely adopted to ensure large language models (LLMs) follow user instructions effectively. The resulting instruction-following capabilities of LLMs heavily rely on the instruction datasets used for tuning. Recently, synthetic instruction datasets have emerged as an economically viable solution to provide LLMs diverse and high-quality instructions. However, existing approaches typically assume that larger or stronger models are stronger teachers for instruction tuning, and hence simply adopt these models as response generators to the synthetic instructions. In this paper, we challenge this commonly-adopted assumption. Our extensive experiments across five base models and twenty response generators reveal that larger and stronger models are not necessarily stronger teachers of smaller models. We refer to this phenomenon as the Larger Models' Paradox. We observe that existing metrics cannot precisely predict the effectiveness of response generators since they ignore the compatibility between teachers and base models being fine-tuned. We thus develop a novel metric, named as Compatibility-Adjusted Reward (CAR) to measure the effectiveness of response generators. Our experiments across five base models demonstrate that CAR outperforms almost all baselines.

Large language models (LLMs) struggle to follow a sequence of instructions in a single query as they may ignore or misinterpret part of it. This impairs their performance in complex problems whose solution requires multiple intermediate steps, such as multilingual (translate then answer) and multimodal (caption then answer) tasks. We empirically verify this with open-source LLMs as large as LLaMA-2 70B and Mixtral-8x7B. Targeting the scarcity of sequential instructions in present-day data, we propose sequential instruction tuning, a simple yet effective strategy to automatically augment instruction tuning data and equip LLMs with the ability to execute multiple sequential instructions. After exploring interleaving instructions in existing datasets, such as Alpaca, with a wide range of intermediate tasks, we find that sequential instruction-tuned models consistently outperform the conventional instruction-tuned baselines in downstream tasks involving reasoning, multilingual, and multimodal abilities. To shed further light on our technique, we analyse how adversarial intermediate texts, unseen tasks, prompt verbalization, number of tasks, and prompt length affect SIT. We hope that this method will open new research avenues on instruction tuning for complex tasks.

Instruction tuning of language models has demonstrated the ability to enhance model generalization to unseen tasks via in-context learning using a few examples. However, typical supervised learning still requires a plethora of downstream training data for finetuning. Often in real-world situations, there is a scarcity of data available for finetuning, falling somewhere between few shot inference and fully supervised finetuning. In this work, we demonstrate the sample efficiency of instruction tuned models over various tasks by estimating the minimal downstream training data required by them to perform transfer learning and match the performance of state-of-the-art (SOTA) supervised models. We conduct experiments on 119 tasks from Super Natural Instructions (SuperNI) in both the single task learning (STL) and multi task learning (MTL) settings. Our findings reveal that, in the STL setting, instruction tuned models equipped with 25% of the downstream train data surpass the SOTA performance on the downstream tasks. In the MTL setting, an instruction tuned model trained on only 6% of downstream training data achieve SOTA, while using 100% of the training data results in a 3.69% points improvement (ROUGE-L 74.68) over the previous SOTA. We conduct an analysis on T5 vs Tk-Instruct by developing several baselines to demonstrate that instruction tuning aids in increasing both sample efficiency and transfer learning. Additionally, we observe a consistent ~4% performance increase in both settings when pre-finetuning is performed with instructions. Finally, we conduct a categorical study and find that contrary to previous results, tasks in the question rewriting and title generation categories suffer from instruction tuning.

Software engineers mainly write code by editing existing programs. In contrast, large language models (LLMs) autoregressively synthesize programs in a single pass. One explanation for this is the scarcity of open-sourced edit data. While high-quality instruction data for code synthesis is already scarce, high-quality edit data is even scarcer. To fill this gap, we develop a synthetic data generation algorithm called LintSeq. This algorithm refactors existing code into a sequence of code edits by using a linter to procedurally sample across the error-free insertions that can be used to sequentially write programs. It outputs edit sequences as text strings consisting of consecutive program diffs. To test LintSeq, we use it to refactor a dataset of instruction + program pairs into instruction + program-diff-sequence tuples. Then, we instruction finetune a series of smaller LLMs ranging from 2.6B to 14B parameters on both the re-factored and original versions of this dataset, comparing zero-shot performance on code synthesis benchmarks. We show that during repeated sampling, edit sequence finetuned models produce more diverse programs than baselines. This results in better inference-time scaling for benchmark coverage as a function of samples, i.e. the fraction of problems "pass@k" solved by any attempt given "k" tries. For example, on HumanEval pass@50, small LLMs finetuned on synthetic edit sequences are competitive with GPT-4 and outperform models finetuned on the baseline dataset by +20% (+/-3%) in absolute score. Finally, we also pretrain our own tiny LMs for code understanding. We show that finetuning tiny models on synthetic code edits results in state-of-the-art code synthesis for the on-device model class. Our 150M parameter edit sequence LM matches or outperforms code models with twice as many parameters, both with and without repeated sampling, including Codex and AlphaCode.

Instruction tuning has shown great promise in the field of natural language processing. However, the research on multilingual instruction tuning has been limited due to the scarcity of high-quality instruction-response datasets. To address this gap, we present Bactrian-X, a comprehensive multilingual parallel dataset of 3.4 million instruction-response pairs across 52 languages. Leveraging this dataset, we train a set of adapters using low-rank adaptation (LoRA), which are lightweight components seamlessly integrated with foundational models. These adapters have a significantly smaller parameter count than the base model, making them easily replaceable and usable as plug-ins for different languages or language groups. Through extensive experiments on 52 languages, we demonstrate the superior performance of our models in various multilingual evaluation settings. Our proposed models outperform both the vanilla models and the existing instruction-tuned models. The code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/mbzuai-nlp/bactrian-x.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated considerable proficiency in general natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Instruction tuning, a successful paradigm, enhances the ability of LLMs to follow natural language instructions and exhibit robust generalization across a wide range of tasks. However, these models often encounter performance limitations across multiple tasks due to constrained model capacity. Expanding this capacity during the instruction tuning phase poses significant challenges. To address this issue, we introduce a novel approach, Parameter-Efficient Sparsity Crafting (PESC), which transitions dense models to sparse models using a Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture. PESC integrates adapters into the MoE layers of sparse models, differentiating experts without altering the individual weights within these layers. This method significantly reduces computational costs and GPU memory requirements, facilitating model capacity expansion through a minimal increase in parameters via the inserted adapters. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of the PESC method. Using PESC during instruction tuning, our sparse models, dubbed Camelidae outperform all other opensource sparse models and exhibit superior general capabilities compared to GPT3.5.

Instruction tuning improves the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs), with data quality and scalability being the crucial factors. Most instruction tuning data come from human crowd-sourcing or GPT-4 distillation. We propose a paradigm to efficiently harvest 10 million naturally existing instruction data from the pre-training web corpus to enhance LLM reasoning. Our approach involves (1) recalling relevant documents, (2) extracting instruction-response pairs, and (3) refining the extracted pairs using open-source LLMs. Fine-tuning base LLMs on this dataset, we build MAmmoTH2 models, which significantly boost performance on reasoning benchmarks. Notably, MAmmoTH2-7B's (Mistral) performance increases from 11% to 34% on MATH and from 36% to 67% on GSM8K without training on any in-domain data. Further training MAmmoTH2 on public instruction tuning datasets yields MAmmoTH2-Plus, achieving state-of-the-art performance on several reasoning and chatbot benchmarks. Our work demonstrates how to harvest large-scale, high-quality instruction data without costly human annotation or GPT-4 distillation, providing a new paradigm for building better instruction tuning data.

As the use of large language models (LLMs) for code generation becomes more prevalent in software development, it is critical to enhance both the efficiency and correctness of the generated code. Existing methods and models primarily focus on the correctness of LLM-generated code, ignoring efficiency. In this work, we present Effi-Code, an approach to enhancing code generation in LLMs that can improve both efficiency and correctness. We introduce a Self-Optimization process based on Overhead Profiling that leverages open-source LLMs to generate a high-quality dataset of correct and efficient code samples. This dataset is then used to fine-tune various LLMs. Our method involves the iterative refinement of generated code, guided by runtime performance metrics and correctness checks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that models fine-tuned on the Effi-Code show significant improvements in both code correctness and efficiency across task types. For example, the pass@1 of DeepSeek-Coder-6.7B-Instruct generated code increases from 43.3\% to 76.8\%, and the average execution time for the same correct tasks decreases by 30.5\%. Effi-Code offers a scalable and generalizable approach to improving code generation in AI systems, with potential applications in software development, algorithm design, and computational problem-solving. The source code of Effi-Code was released in https://github.com/huangd1999/Effi-Code.

As large language models (LLMs) continue to advance, instruction tuning has become critical for improving their ability to generate accurate and contextually appropriate responses. Although numerous instruction-tuning datasets have been developed to enhance LLM performance, selecting high-quality instruction data from large source datasets typically demands significant human effort. In this work, we introduce IterSelectTune, an efficient, cost-effective iterative training policy for selecting high-quality instruction data with no human involvement and limited reliance on GPT-4. By fine-tuning on approximately 20\% of the source data, our method consistently outperforms models fine-tuned on the full dataset across multiple benchmarks and public test datasets. These results highlight the effectiveness of our approach in enhancing LLM performance while reducing the computational resources required for instruction tuning.

Instruction tuning enables pretrained language models to perform new tasks from inference-time natural language descriptions. These approaches rely on vast amounts of human supervision in the form of crowdsourced datasets or user interactions. In this work, we introduce Unnatural Instructions: a large dataset of creative and diverse instructions, collected with virtually no human labor. We collect 64,000 examples by prompting a language model with three seed examples of instructions and eliciting a fourth. This set is then expanded by prompting the model to rephrase each instruction, creating a total of approximately 240,000 examples of instructions, inputs, and outputs. Experiments show that despite containing a fair amount of noise, training on Unnatural Instructions rivals the effectiveness of training on open-source manually-curated datasets, surpassing the performance of models such as T0++ and Tk-Instruct across various benchmarks. These results demonstrate the potential of model-generated data as a cost-effective alternative to crowdsourcing for dataset expansion and diversification.

Aligning large language models(LLMs) with human is a critical step in effectively utilizing their pre-trained capabilities across a wide array of language tasks. Current instruction tuning practices often rely on expanding dataset size without a clear strategy for ensuring data quality, which can inadvertently introduce noise and degrade model performance. To address this challenge, we introduce Nuggets, a novel and efficient methodology that employs one shot learning to select high-quality instruction data from expansive datasets. Nuggets assesses the potential of individual instruction examples to act as effective one shot examples, thereby identifying those that can significantly enhance diverse task performance. 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 beneficial data for instruction tuning. Through rigorous testing on two benchmarks, including MT-Bench and Alpaca-Eval, we demonstrate that instruction tuning with the top 1% of Nuggets-curated examples substantially outperforms conventional methods that use the full dataset. These findings advocate for a data selection paradigm that prioritizes quality, offering a more efficient pathway to align LLMs with humans.

Instruction tuning is critical for adapting large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks, and recent studies have demonstrated that small amounts of human-curated data can outperform larger datasets, challenging traditional data scaling laws. While LLM-based data quality rating systems offer a cost-effective alternative to human annotation, they often suffer from inaccuracies and biases, even in powerful models like GPT-4. In this work, we introduce DS2, a Diversity-aware Score curation method for Data Selection. By systematically modeling error patterns through a score transition matrix, DS2 corrects LLM-based scores and promotes diversity in the selected data samples. Our approach shows that a curated subset (just 3.3% of the original dataset) outperforms full-scale datasets (300k samples) across various machine-alignment benchmarks, and matches or surpasses human-aligned datasets such as LIMA with the same sample size (1k samples). These findings challenge conventional data scaling assumptions, highlighting that redundant, low-quality samples can degrade performance and reaffirming that "more can be less."

The ability of CodeLLMs to generate executable and functionally correct code at the repository-level scale remains largely unexplored. We introduce RepoExec, a novel benchmark for evaluating code generation at the repository-level scale. RepoExec focuses on three main aspects: executability, functional correctness through automated test case generation with high coverage rate, and carefully crafted cross-file contexts to accurately generate code. Our work explores a controlled scenario where developers specify necessary code dependencies, challenging the model to integrate these accurately. Experiments show that while pretrained LLMs outperform instruction-tuned models in correctness, the latter excel in utilizing provided dependencies and demonstrating debugging capabilities. We also introduce a new instruction-tuned dataset that focuses on code dependencies and demonstrate that CodeLLMs fine-tuned on our dataset have a better capability to leverage these dependencies effectively. RepoExec aims to provide a comprehensive evaluation of code functionality and alignment with developer intent, paving the way for more reliable and applicable CodeLLMs in real-world scenarios. The dataset and source code can be found at~https://github.com/FSoft-AI4Code/RepoExec.

Recently, Instruction fine-tuning has risen to prominence as a potential method for enhancing the zero-shot capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) on novel tasks. This technique has shown an exceptional ability to boost the performance of moderately sized LLMs, sometimes even reaching performance levels comparable to those of much larger model variants. The focus is on the robustness of instruction-tuned LLMs to seen and unseen tasks. We conducted an exploration of six models including Alpaca, Vicuna, WizardLM, and Traditional Task-oriented Models(Flan-T5-XL/XXL, T0++) using real-world relation extraction datasets as case studies. We carried out a comprehensive evaluation of these instruction-following LLMs which have been tuned based on open-domain instructions and task-oriented instructions. The main discussion is their performance and robustness towards instructions. We have observed that in most cases, the model's performance in dealing with unfamiliar instructions tends to worsen significantly, and the robustness of the model for RE instructions deteriorates compared to QA. Further, we discovered that up until a certain parameter size threshold (3B), the performance of the FLAN-T5 model improves as the parameter count increases. The robustness of different scales of FLAN-T5 models to RE instruction is worse than the robustness to QA instruction.

Code optimization is a daunting task that requires a significant level of expertise from experienced programmers. This level of expertise is not sufficient when compared to the rapid development of new hardware architectures. Towards advancing the whole code optimization process, recent approaches rely on machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques. This paper introduces a new framework to decrease the complexity of code optimization. The proposed framework builds on large language models (LLMs) and reinforcement learning (RL) and enables LLMs to receive feedback from their environment (i.e., unit tests) during the fine-tuning process. We compare our framework with existing state-of-the-art models and show that it is more efficient with respect to speed and computational usage, as a result of the decrement in training steps and its applicability to models with fewer parameters. Additionally, our framework reduces the possibility of logical and syntactical errors. Toward evaluating our approach, we run several experiments on the PIE dataset using a CodeT5 language model and RRHF, a new reinforcement learning algorithm. We adopt a variety of evaluation metrics with regards to optimization quality, and speedup. The evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed framework has similar results in comparison with existing models using shorter training times and smaller pre-trained models. In particular, we accomplish an increase of 5.6% and 2.2 over the baseline models concerning the %OP T and SP metrics.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have expanded the horizons of natural language understanding and generation. Notably, the output control and alignment with the input of LLMs can be refined through instruction tuning. However, as highlighted in several studies, low-quality data in the training set are usually detrimental to instruction tuning, resulting in inconsistent or even misleading LLM outputs. We propose a novel method, termed "reflection-tuning," which addresses the problem by self-improvement and judging capabilities of LLMs. This approach utilizes an oracle LLM to recycle the original training data by introspecting and enhancing the quality of instructions and responses in the data. Extensive experiments on widely used evaluation benchmarks show that LLMs trained with our recycled data outperform those trained with existing datasets in various benchmarks.

Instruction tuning is critical to improve LLMs but usually suffers from low-quality and redundant data. Data filtering for instruction tuning has proved important in improving both the efficiency and performance of the tuning process. But it also leads to extra cost and computation due to the involvement of LLMs in this process. To reduce the filtering cost, we study Superfiltering: Can we use a smaller and weaker model to select data for finetuning a larger and stronger model? Despite the performance gap between weak and strong language models, we find their highly consistent capability to perceive instruction difficulty and data selection results. This enables us to use a much smaller and more efficient model to filter the instruction data used to train a larger language model. Not only does it largely speed up the data filtering, but the filtered-data-finetuned LLM achieves even better performance on standard benchmarks. Extensive experiments validate the efficacy and efficiency of our approach.

With contributions from the open-source community, a vast amount of instruction tuning (IT) data has emerged. Given the significant resource allocation required for training and evaluating models, it is advantageous to have an efficient method for selecting high-quality IT data. However, existing methods for instruction data selection have limitations such as relying on fragile external APIs, being affected by biases in GPT models, or reducing the diversity of the selected instruction dataset. In this paper, we propose an industrial-friendly, expert-aligned and diversity-preserved instruction data selection method: Clustering and Ranking (CaR). CaR employs a two-step process: first, it ranks instruction pairs using a high-accuracy (84.25%) scoring model aligned with expert preferences; second, it preserves dataset diversity through clustering. In our experiment, CaR efficiently selected a mere 1.96% of Alpaca's IT data, yet the resulting AlpaCaR model surpassed Alpaca's performance by an average of 32.1% in GPT-4 evaluations. Moreover, we find that data selecting is a consistent paradigm whether the pre-trained model is more capable or the model parameters scaling up. Our approach employs compact models with 550M parameters and incurs just 11.2% of the financial outlay of current methods, enhancing its industrial deployability.

Instruction tuning represents a prevalent strategy employed by Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to align with human instructions and adapt to new tasks. Nevertheless, MLLMs encounter the challenge of adapting to users' evolving knowledge and demands. Therefore, how to retain existing skills while acquiring new knowledge needs to be investigated. In this paper, we present a comprehensive benchmark, namely Continual Instruction tuNing (CoIN), to assess existing MLLMs in the sequential instruction tuning paradigm. CoIN comprises 10 commonly used datasets spanning 8 task categories, ensuring a diverse range of instructions and tasks. Besides, the trained model is evaluated from two aspects: Instruction Following and General Knowledge, which assess the alignment with human intention and knowledge preserved for reasoning, respectively. Experiments on CoIN demonstrate that current powerful MLLMs still suffer catastrophic forgetting, and the failure in intention alignment assumes the main responsibility, instead of the knowledge forgetting. To this end, we introduce MoELoRA to MLLMs which is effective to retain the previous instruction alignment. Experimental results consistently illustrate the forgetting decreased from this method on CoIN.

A significant amount of research is focused on developing and evaluating large language models for a variety of code synthesis tasks. These include synthesizing code from natural language instructions, synthesizing tests from code, and synthesizing explanations of code. In contrast, the behavior of instructional code editing with LLMs is understudied. These are tasks in which the model is instructed to update a block of code provided in a prompt. The editing instruction may ask for a feature to added or removed, describe a bug and ask for a fix, ask for a different kind of solution, or many other common code editing tasks. We introduce a carefully crafted benchmark of code editing tasks and use it evaluate several cutting edge LLMs. Our evaluation exposes a significant gap between the capabilities of state-of-the-art open and closed models. For example, even GPT-3.5-Turbo is 8.8% better than the best open model at editing code. We also introduce a new, carefully curated, permissively licensed training set of code edits coupled with natural language instructions. Using this training set, we show that we can fine-tune open Code LLMs to significantly improve their code editing capabilities.

Despite the advancements of open-source large language models (LLMs) and their variants, e.g., LLaMA and Vicuna, they remain significantly limited in performing higher-level tasks, such as following human instructions to use external tools (APIs). This is because current instruction tuning largely focuses on basic language tasks instead of the tool-use domain. This is in contrast to state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLMs, e.g., ChatGPT, which have demonstrated excellent tool-use capabilities but are unfortunately closed source. To facilitate tool-use capabilities within open-source LLMs, we introduce ToolLLM, a general tool-use framework of data construction, model training and evaluation. We first present ToolBench, an instruction-tuning dataset for tool use, which is created automatically using ChatGPT. Specifically, we collect 16,464 real-world RESTful APIs spanning 49 categories from RapidAPI Hub, then prompt ChatGPT to generate diverse human instructions involving these APIs, covering both single-tool and multi-tool scenarios. Finally, we use ChatGPT to search for a valid solution path (chain of API calls) for each instruction. To make the searching process more efficient, we develop a novel depth-first search-based decision tree (DFSDT), enabling LLMs to evaluate multiple reasoning traces and expand the search space. We show that DFSDT significantly enhances the planning and reasoning capabilities of LLMs. For efficient tool-use assessment, we develop an automatic evaluator: ToolEval. We fine-tune LLaMA on ToolBench and obtain ToolLLaMA. Our ToolEval reveals that ToolLLaMA demonstrates a remarkable ability to execute complex instructions and generalize to unseen APIs, and exhibits comparable performance to ChatGPT. To make the pipeline more practical, we devise a neural API retriever to recommend appropriate APIs for each instruction, negating the need for manual API selection.

Recently, fine-tuning pre-trained code models such as CodeBERT on downstream tasks has achieved great success in many software testing and analysis tasks. While effective and prevalent, fine-tuning the pre-trained parameters incurs a large computational cost. In this paper, we conduct an extensive experimental study to explore what happens to layer-wise pre-trained representations and their encoded code knowledge during fine-tuning. We then propose efficient alternatives to fine-tune the large pre-trained code model based on the above findings. Our experimental study shows that (1) lexical, syntactic and structural properties of source code are encoded in the lower, intermediate, and higher layers, respectively, while the semantic property spans across the entire model. (2) The process of fine-tuning preserves most of the code properties. Specifically, the basic code properties captured by lower and intermediate layers are still preserved during fine-tuning. Furthermore, we find that only the representations of the top two layers change most during fine-tuning for various downstream tasks. (3) Based on the above findings, we propose Telly to efficiently fine-tune pre-trained code models via layer freezing. The extensive experimental results on five various downstream tasks demonstrate that training parameters and the corresponding time cost are greatly reduced, while performances are similar or better. Replication package including source code, datasets, and online Appendix is available at: https://github.com/DeepSoftwareAnalytics/Telly.

Automatic evaluation of natural language generation has long been an elusive goal in NLP.A recent paradigm fine-tunes pre-trained language models to emulate human judgements for a particular task and evaluation criterion. Inspired by the generalization ability of instruction-tuned models, we propose a learned metric based on instruction tuning. To test our approach, we collected HEAP, a dataset of human judgements across various NLG tasks and evaluation criteria. Our findings demonstrate that instruction tuning language models on HEAP yields good performance on many evaluation tasks, though some criteria are less trivial to learn than others. Further, jointly training on multiple tasks can yield additional performance improvements, which can be beneficial for future tasks with little to no human annotated data.

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) enable exciting LLM-integrated applications, which perform text-based tasks by utilizing their advanced language understanding capabilities. However, as LLMs have improved, so have the attacks against them. Prompt injection attacks are an important threat: they trick the model to deviate from the original application's instructions and instead follow user directives. These attacks rely on the LLM's ability to follow instructions and inability to separate the prompts and user data. We introduce structured queries, a general approach to tackle this problem. Structured queries separate prompts and data into two channels. We implement a system that supports structured queries. This system is made of (1) a secure front-end that formats a prompt and user data into a special format, and (2) a specially trained LLM that can produce high-quality outputs from these inputs. The LLM is trained using a novel fine-tuning strategy: we convert a base (non-instruction-tuned) LLM to a structured instruction-tuned model that will only follow instructions in the prompt portion of a query. To do so, we augment standard instruction tuning datasets with examples that also include instructions in the data portion of the query, and fine-tune the model to ignore these. Our system significantly improves resistance to prompt injection attacks, with little or no impact on utility. Our code is released at https://github.com/Sizhe-Chen/PromptInjectionDefense.

The advent of instruction-tuned Large Language Models designed for coding tasks (Code LLMs) has transformed software engineering practices. However, their robustness against various input challenges remains a critical concern. This study introduces DegradePrompter, a novel method designed to systematically evaluate the robustness of instruction-tuned Code LLMs. We assess the impact of diverse input challenges on the functionality and correctness of generated code using rigorous metrics and established benchmarks. Our comprehensive evaluation includes five state-of-the-art open-source models and three production-grade closed-source models, revealing varying degrees of robustness. Open-source models demonstrate an increased susceptibility to input perturbations, resulting in declines in functional correctness ranging from 12% to 34%. In contrast, commercial models demonstrate relatively greater resilience, with performance degradation ranging from 3% to 24%. To enhance the robustness of the models against these vulnerabilities, we investigate a straightforward yet effective mitigation strategy. Our findings highlight the need for robust defense mechanisms and comprehensive evaluations during both the development and deployment phases to ensure the resilience and reliability of automated code generation systems.

A key technology for the development of large language models (LLMs) involves instruction tuning that helps align the models' responses with human expectations to realize impressive learning abilities. Two major approaches for instruction tuning characterize supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), which are currently applied to produce the best commercial LLMs (e.g., ChatGPT). To improve the accessibility of LLMs for research and development efforts, various instruction-tuned open-source LLMs have also been introduced recently, e.g., Alpaca, Vicuna, to name a few. However, existing open-source LLMs have only been instruction-tuned for English and a few popular languages, thus hindering their impacts and accessibility to many other languages in the world. Among a few very recent work to explore instruction tuning for LLMs in multiple languages, SFT has been used as the only approach to instruction-tune LLMs for multiple languages. This has left a significant gap for fine-tuned LLMs based on RLHF in diverse languages and raised important questions on how RLHF can boost the performance of multilingual instruction tuning. To overcome this issue, we present Okapi, the first system with instruction-tuned LLMs based on RLHF for multiple languages. Okapi introduces instruction and response-ranked data in 26 diverse languages to facilitate the experiments and development of future multilingual LLM research. We also present benchmark datasets to enable the evaluation of generative LLMs in multiple languages. Our experiments demonstrate the advantages of RLHF for multilingual instruction over SFT for different base models and datasets. Our framework and resources are released at https://github.com/nlp-uoregon/Okapi.

Instruction fine-tuning stands as a crucial advancement in leveraging large language models (LLMs) for enhanced task performance. However, the annotation of instruction datasets has traditionally been expensive and laborious, often relying on manual annotations or costly API calls of proprietary LLMs. To address these challenges, we introduce FANNO, a fully autonomous, open-sourced framework that revolutionizes the annotation process without the need for pre-existing annotated data. Utilizing a Mistral-7b-instruct model, FANNO efficiently produces diverse and high-quality datasets through a structured process involving document pre-screening, instruction generation, and response generation. Experiments on Open LLM Leaderboard and AlpacaEval benchmark show that the FANNO can generate high-quality data with diversity and complexity for free, comparable to human-annotated or cleaned datasets like Alpaca-GPT4-Cleaned.

There is a consensus that instruction fine-tuning of LLMs requires high-quality data, but what are they? LIMA (NeurIPS 2023) and AlpaGasus (ICLR 2024) are state-of-the-art methods for selecting such high-quality examples, either via manual curation or using GPT-3.5-Turbo as a quality scorer. We show that the extremely simple baseline of selecting the 1,000 instructions with longest responses from standard datasets can consistently outperform these sophisticated methods according to GPT-4 and PaLM-2 as judges, while remaining competitive on the OpenLLM benchmarks that test factual knowledge. We demonstrate this for several state-of-the-art LLMs (Llama-2-7B, Llama-2-13B, and Mistral-7B) and datasets (Alpaca-52k and Evol-Instruct-70k). In addition, a lightweight refinement of such long instructions can further improve the abilities of the fine-tuned LLMs, and allows us to obtain the 2nd highest-ranked Llama-2-7B-based model on AlpacaEval 2.0 while training on only 1,000 examples and no extra preference data. We also conduct a thorough analysis of our models to ensure that their enhanced performance is not simply due to GPT-4's preference for longer responses, thus ruling out any artificial improvement. In conclusion, our findings suggest that fine-tuning on the longest instructions should be the default baseline for any research on instruction fine-tuning.

The waning of Moore's Law has shifted the focus of the tech industry towards alternative methods for continued performance gains. While optimizing compilers are a standard tool to help increase program efficiency, programmers continue to shoulder much responsibility in crafting and refactoring code with better performance characteristics. In this paper, we investigate the ability of large language models (LLMs) to suggest functionally correct, performance improving code edits. We hypothesize that language models can suggest such edits in ways that would be impractical for static analysis alone. We investigate these questions by curating a large-scale dataset of Performance-Improving Edits, PIE. PIE contains trajectories of programs, where a programmer begins with an initial, slower version and iteratively makes changes to improve the program's performance. We use PIE to evaluate and improve the capacity of large language models. Specifically, use examples from PIE to fine-tune multiple variants of CODEGEN, a billion-scale Transformer-decoder model. Additionally, we use examples from PIE to prompt OpenAI's CODEX using a few-shot prompting. By leveraging PIE, we find that both CODEX and CODEGEN can generate performance-improving edits, with speedups of more than 2.5x for over 25% of the programs, for C++ and Python, even after the C++ programs were compiled using the O3 optimization level. Crucially, we show that PIE allows CODEGEN, an open-sourced and 10x smaller model than CODEX, to match the performance of CODEX on this challenging task. Overall, this work opens new doors for creating systems and methods that can help programmers write efficient code.

Large "instruction-tuned" language models (finetuned to respond to instructions) have demonstrated a remarkable ability to generalize zero-shot to new tasks. Nevertheless, they depend heavily on human-written instruction data that is limited in quantity, diversity, and creativity, therefore hindering the generality of the tuned model. We introduce Self-Instruct, a framework for improving the instruction-following capabilities of pretrained language models by bootstrapping off its own generations. Our pipeline generates instruction, input, and output samples from a language model, then prunes them before using them to finetune the original model. Applying our method to vanilla GPT3, we demonstrate a 33% absolute improvement over the original model on Super-NaturalInstructions, on par with the performance of InstructGPT_001, which is trained with private user data and human annotations. For further evaluation, we curate a set of expert-written instructions for novel tasks, and show through human evaluation that tuning GPT3 with Self-Instruct outperforms using existing public instruction datasets by a large margin, leaving only a 5% absolute gap behind InstructGPT_001. Self-Instruct provides an almost annotation-free method for aligning pre-trained language models with instructions, and we release our large synthetic dataset to facilitate future studies on instruction tuning.

Recent advancements in large vision-language models (LVLMs), such as GPT4-V and LLaVA, have been substantial. LLaVA's modular architecture, in particular, offers a blend of simplicity and efficiency. Recent works mainly focus on introducing more pre-training and instruction tuning data to improve model's performance. This paper delves into the often-neglected aspects of data efficiency during pre-training and the selection process for instruction tuning datasets. Our research indicates that merely increasing the size of pre-training data does not guarantee improved performance and may, in fact, lead to its degradation. Furthermore, we have established a pipeline to pinpoint the most efficient instruction tuning (SFT) dataset, implying that not all SFT data utilized in existing studies are necessary. The primary objective of this paper is not to introduce a state-of-the-art model, but rather to serve as a roadmap for future research, aiming to optimize data usage during pre-training and fine-tuning processes to enhance the performance of vision-language models.

Instruction tuning has remarkably advanced large language models (LLMs) in understanding and responding to diverse human instructions. Despite the success in high-resource languages, its application in lower-resource ones faces challenges due to the imbalanced foundational abilities of LLMs across different languages, stemming from the uneven language distribution in their pre-training data. To tackle this issue, we propose pivot language guided generation (PLUG), an approach that utilizes a high-resource language, primarily English, as the pivot to enhance instruction tuning in lower-resource languages. It trains the model to first process instructions in the pivot language, and then produce responses in the target language. To evaluate our approach, we introduce a benchmark, X-AlpacaEval, of instructions in 4 languages (Chinese, Korean, Italian, and Spanish), each annotated by professional translators. Our approach demonstrates a significant improvement in the instruction-following abilities of LLMs by 29% on average, compared to directly responding in the target language alone. Further experiments validate the versatility of our approach by employing alternative pivot languages beyond English to assist languages where LLMs exhibit lower proficiency.

General-purpose language models that can solve various language-domain tasks have emerged driven by the pre-training and instruction-tuning pipeline. However, building general-purpose vision-language models is challenging due to the increased task discrepancy introduced by the additional visual input. Although vision-language pre-training has been widely studied, vision-language instruction tuning remains relatively less explored. In this paper, we conduct a systematic and comprehensive study on vision-language instruction tuning based on the pre-trained BLIP-2 models. We gather a wide variety of 26 publicly available datasets, transform them into instruction tuning format and categorize them into two clusters for held-in instruction tuning and held-out zero-shot evaluation. Additionally, we introduce instruction-aware visual feature extraction, a crucial method that enables the model to extract informative features tailored to the given instruction. The resulting InstructBLIP models achieve state-of-the-art zero-shot performance across all 13 held-out datasets, substantially outperforming BLIP-2 and the larger Flamingo. Our models also lead to state-of-the-art performance when finetuned on individual downstream tasks (e.g., 90.7% accuracy on ScienceQA IMG). Furthermore, we qualitatively demonstrate the advantages of InstructBLIP over concurrent multimodal models. All InstructBLIP models have been open-sourced at https://github.com/salesforce/LAVIS/tree/main/projects/instructblip.

To induce desired behaviors in large language models (LLMs) for interaction-driven tasks, the instruction-tuning stage typically trains LLMs on instruction-response pairs using the next-token prediction (NTP) loss. Previous work aiming to improve instruction-tuning performance often emphasizes the need for higher-quality supervised fine-tuning (SFT) datasets, which typically involves expensive data filtering with proprietary LLMs or labor-intensive data generation by human annotators. However, these approaches do not fully leverage the datasets' intrinsic properties, resulting in high computational and labor costs, thereby limiting scalability and performance gains. In this paper, we propose SFTMix, a novel recipe that elevates instruction-tuning performance beyond the conventional NTP paradigm, without the need for well-curated datasets. Observing that LLMs exhibit uneven confidence across the semantic representation space, we argue that examples with different confidence levels should play distinct roles during the instruction-tuning process. Based on this insight, SFTMix leverages training dynamics to identify examples with varying confidence levels, then applies a Mixup-based regularization to mitigate overfitting on confident examples while propagating supervision signals to improve learning on relatively unconfident ones. This approach enables SFTMix to significantly outperform NTP across a wide range of instruction-following and healthcare domain-specific SFT tasks, demonstrating its adaptability to diverse LLM families and scalability to datasets of any size. Comprehensive ablation studies further verify the robustness of SFTMix's design choices, underscoring its versatility in consistently enhancing performance across different LLMs and datasets in broader natural language processing applications.

Scene text editing is a challenging task that involves modifying or inserting specified texts in an image while maintaining its natural and realistic appearance. Most previous approaches to this task rely on style-transfer models that crop out text regions and feed them into image transfer models, such as GANs. However, these methods are limited in their ability to change text style and are unable to insert texts into images. Recent advances in diffusion models have shown promise in overcoming these limitations with text-conditional image editing. However, our empirical analysis reveals that state-of-the-art diffusion models struggle with rendering correct text and controlling text style. To address these problems, we propose DIFFSTE to improve pre-trained diffusion models with a dual encoder design, which includes a character encoder for better text legibility and an instruction encoder for better style control. An instruction tuning framework is introduced to train our model to learn the mapping from the text instruction to the corresponding image with either the specified style or the style of the surrounding texts in the background. Such a training method further brings our method the zero-shot generalization ability to the following three scenarios: generating text with unseen font variation, e.g., italic and bold, mixing different fonts to construct a new font, and using more relaxed forms of natural language as the instructions to guide the generation task. We evaluate our approach on five datasets and demonstrate its superior performance in terms of text correctness, image naturalness, and style controllability. Our code is publicly available. https://github.com/UCSB-NLP-Chang/DiffSTE

This paper explores a simple method for improving the zero-shot learning abilities of language models. We show that instruction tuning -- finetuning language models on a collection of tasks described via instructions -- substantially improves zero-shot performance on unseen tasks. We take a 137B parameter pretrained language model and instruction-tune it on over 60 NLP tasks verbalized via natural language instruction templates. We evaluate this instruction-tuned model, which we call FLAN, on unseen task types. FLAN substantially improves the performance of its unmodified counterpart and surpasses zero-shot 175B GPT-3 on 20 of 25 tasks that we evaluate. FLAN even outperforms few-shot GPT-3 by a large margin on ANLI, RTE, BoolQ, AI2-ARC, OpenbookQA, and StoryCloze. Ablation studies reveal that number of finetuning datasets, model scale, and natural language instructions are key to the success of instruction tuning.

Instruction fine-tuning is crucial for today's large language models (LLMs) to learn to follow instructions and align with human preferences. Conventionally, supervised data, including the instruction and the correct response, is required for instruction fine-tuning. To obtain such data, some researchers prompted well-trained models like GPT-4 to generate instructions and correct responses. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that uses the first half of a random text from OpenWebText as the instruction and GPT-3.5-turbo or GPT-4-turbo to complete the text as the response. Despite the data being "non-instructional", we found that pre-trained LLMs fine-tuned on this data can gain instruction-following capabilities. This observation is verified by fine-tuning several well-known pre-trained LLMs (e.g., LLaMA-2-7B, LLaMA-3-8B, LLaMA-3-70B, Mistral-7B-v0.1). The "non-instructional data" also improved some models that underwent supervised fine-tuning and human preference alignment. Our LLaMA-3-70B-Instruct fine-tuned through "non-instructional data" is comparable with LLaMA-3.1-70B-Instruct on the Arena Hard leaderboard. We analyzed the "non-instructional data" and ensured it is devoid of content related to instruction fine-tuning. Our findings will inspire further investigation into how to develop instruction-following capabilities without explicit instruction-related data.

The ability of large language models (LLMs) to follow instructions is crucial to real-world applications. Despite recent advances, several studies have highlighted that LLMs struggle when faced with challenging instructions, especially those that include complex constraints, hindering their effectiveness in various tasks. To address this challenge, we introduce Conifer, a novel instruction tuning dataset, designed to enhance LLMs to follow multi-level instructions with complex constraints. Utilizing GPT-4, we curate the dataset by a series of LLM-driven refinement processes to ensure high quality. We also propose a progressive learning scheme that emphasizes an easy-to-hard progression, and learning from process feedback. Models trained with Conifer exhibit remarkable improvements in instruction-following abilities, especially for instructions with complex constraints. On several instruction-following benchmarks, our 7B model outperforms the state-of-the-art open-source 7B models, even exceeds the performance of models 10 times larger on certain metrics. All the code and Conifer dataset are available at https://www.github.com/ConiferLM/Conifer.

Instruction-tuned models are trained on crowdsourcing datasets with task instructions to achieve superior performance. However, in this work we raise security concerns about this training paradigm. Our studies demonstrate that an attacker can inject backdoors by issuing very few malicious instructions among thousands of gathered data and control model behavior through data poisoning, without even the need of modifying data instances or labels themselves. Through such instruction attacks, the attacker can achieve over 90% attack success rate across four commonly used NLP datasets, and cause persistent backdoors that are easily transferred to 15 diverse datasets zero-shot. In this way, the attacker can directly apply poisoned instructions designed for one dataset on many other datasets. Moreover, the poisoned model cannot be cured by continual learning. Lastly, instruction attacks show resistance to existing inference-time defense. These findings highlight the need for more robust defenses against data poisoning attacks in instructiontuning models and underscore the importance of ensuring data quality in instruction crowdsourcing.

Effective code optimization in compilers plays a central role in computer and software engineering. While compilers can be made to automatically search the optimization space without the need for user interventions, this is not a standard practice since the search is slow and cumbersome. Here we present CodeZero, an artificial intelligence agent trained extensively on large data to produce effective optimization strategies instantly for each program in a single trial of the agent. To overcome the huge range of possible test programs, we prepare a large dataset of training programs that emphasize quality, naturalness, and diversity. To tackle the vast space of possible optimizations, we adapt deep reinforcement learning to train the agent in a sample-efficient manner through interacting with a world model of the compiler environment. Evaluation on both benchmark suites and production-level code optimization problems demonstrates our agent's supercompiler performances and zero-shot generalization abilities, outperforming built-in optimization options designed by compiler experts. Our methodology kindles the great potential of artificial intelligence for engineering and paves the way for scaling machine learning techniques in the realm of code optimization.

Instruction fine-tuning (IFT) elicits instruction following capabilities and steers the behavior of large language models (LLMs) via supervised learning. However, existing models trained on open-source IFT datasets only have the ability to follow instructions from users, and often fail to follow complex role and rules specified by developers, a.k.a. system prompts. The ability to follow these roles and rules is essential for deployment, as it ensures that the model safely interacts with users within developer defined guidelines. To improve such role and rule following ability, we propose \model, an automated data generation pipeline that generates diverse roles and rules from existing IFT instructions, along with corresponding responses. This data can then be used to train models that follow complex system prompts. The models are evaluated on our newly created benchmarks for role and rule following ability, as well as standard instruction-following benchmarks and general NLP tasks. Our framework significantly improves role and rule following capability in LLMs, as evidenced by over 25% increase in pass-rate on rule adherence, i.e. following all requirements, in our experiments with the Alpaca and Ultrachat datasets. Moreover, our models achieves this increase without any regression on popular instruction following benchmarks.

AI-powered coding assistants such as GitHub Copilot and OpenAI ChatGPT have achieved notable success in automating code generation. However, these tools rely on pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) that are typically trained on human-written code sourced from open-source project hosting sites like GitHub, which often contains inherent security vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities may then be mirrored in the code generated by these LLMs, a critical risk revealed and highlighted by recent empirical studies. In this work, we present an exploratory study on whether fine-tuning pre-trained LLMs on datasets of vulnerability-fixing commits can promote secure code generation. We explored two parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques (LoRa and IA3) on two pre-trained LLMs for code generation. We crawled a fine-tuning dataset (14,622 C and C++ files) for secure code generation by collecting code fixes of confirmed vulnerabilities from open-source repositories. Our evaluation dataset comprises 52 vulnerability scenarios designed to cover the top most dangerous C and C++ Common Weakness Enumerations (CWEs). Each scenario is a prompt that may induce LLMs to generate vulnerable code. Our exploration reveals that fine-tuning LLMs can improve secure code generation by 6.4% in C language and 5.4% in C++ language. We further experimented with fine-tuning LLMs using different versions of the collected secure code dataset (block, function, and line). We found that fine-tuning with function-level and block-level datasets achieves the best secure code generation performance, compared to the alternatives (file-level and line-level).

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) with a collection of large and diverse instructions has improved the model's generalization to different tasks, even for unseen tasks. However, most existing instruction datasets include only single instructions, and they struggle to follow complex instructions composed of multiple subtasks (Wang et al., 2023a). In this work, we propose a novel concept of compositional instructions called chain-of-instructions (CoI), where the output of one instruction becomes an input for the next like a chain. Unlike the conventional practice of solving single instruction tasks, our proposed method encourages a model to solve each subtask step by step until the final answer is reached. CoI-tuning (i.e., fine-tuning with CoI instructions) improves the model's ability to handle instructions composed of multiple subtasks. CoI-tuned models also outperformed baseline models on multilingual summarization, demonstrating the generalizability of CoI models on unseen composite downstream tasks.

As pre-trained models automate many code intelligence tasks, a widely used paradigm is to fine-tune a model on the task dataset for each programming language. A recent study reported that multilingual fine-tuning benefits a range of tasks and models. However, we find that multilingual fine-tuning leads to performance degradation on recent models UniXcoder and CodeT5. To alleviate the potentially catastrophic forgetting issue in multilingual models, we fix all pre-trained model parameters, insert the parameter-efficient structure adapter, and fine-tune it. Updating only 0.6\% of the overall parameters compared to full-model fine-tuning for each programming language, adapter tuning yields consistent improvements on code search and summarization tasks, achieving state-of-the-art results. In addition, we experimentally show its effectiveness in cross-lingual and low-resource scenarios. Multilingual fine-tuning with 200 samples per programming language approaches the results fine-tuned with the entire dataset on code summarization. Our experiments on three probing tasks show that adapter tuning significantly outperforms full-model fine-tuning and effectively overcomes catastrophic forgetting.

Instruction Fine-Tuning (IFT) is a powerful paradigm that strengthens the zero-shot capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), but in doing so induces new evaluation metric requirements. We show LLM-based metrics to be well adapted to these requirements, and leverage them to conduct an investigation of task-specialization strategies, quantifying the trade-offs that emerge in practical industrial settings. Our findings offer practitioners actionable insights for real-world IFT model deployment.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant enhancements in instruction-following abilities through instruction tuning, achieving notable performances across various tasks. Previous research has focused on fine-tuning medical domain-specific LLMs using an extensive array of medical-specific data, incorporating millions of pieces of biomedical literature to augment their medical capabilities. However, existing medical instruction-tuned LLMs have been constrained by the limited scope of tasks and instructions available, restricting the efficacy of instruction tuning and adversely affecting performance in the general domain. In this paper, we fine-tune LLaMA-series models using 52k diverse, machine-generated, medical instruction-following data, MedInstruct-52k, resulting in the model AlpaCare. Comprehensive experimental results on both general and medical-specific domain free-form instruction evaluations showcase AlpaCare's strong medical proficiency and generalizability compared to previous instruction-tuned models in both medical and general domains. We provide public access to our MedInstruct-52k dataset and a clinician-crafted free-form instruction test set, MedInstruct-test, along with our codebase, to foster further research and development. Our project page is available at https://github.com/XZhang97666/AlpaCare.

Current multimodal language models (MLMs) evaluation and training approaches overlook the influence of instruction format, presenting an elephant-in-the-room problem. Previous research deals with this problem by manually crafting instructions, failing to yield significant insights due to limitations in diversity and scalability. In this work, we propose a programmatic instruction template generator capable of producing over 39B unique template combinations by filling randomly sampled positional synonyms into weighted sampled meta templates, enabling us to comprehensively examine the MLM's performance across diverse instruction templates. Our experiments across eight common MLMs on five benchmark datasets reveal that MLMs have high template sensitivities with at most 29% performance gaps between different templates. We further augment the instruction tuning dataset of LLaVA-1.5 with our template generator and perform instruction tuning on LLaVA-1.5-7B and LLaVA-1.5-13B. Models tuned on our augmented dataset achieve the best overall performance when compared with the same scale MLMs tuned on at most 75 times the scale of our augmented dataset, highlighting the importance of instruction templates in MLM training. The code is available at https://github.com/shijian2001/TemplateMatters .

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant universal capabilities as few/zero-shot learners in various tasks due to their pre-training on vast amounts of text data, as exemplified by GPT-3, which boosted to InstrctGPT and ChatGPT, effectively following natural language instructions to accomplish real-world tasks. In this paper, we propose to introduce instruction tuning into multi-modal models, motivated by the Flamingo model's upstream interleaved format pretraining dataset. We adopt a similar approach to construct our MultI-Modal In-Context Instruction Tuning (MIMIC-IT) dataset. We then introduce Otter, a multi-modal model based on OpenFlamingo (open-sourced version of DeepMind's Flamingo), trained on MIMIC-IT and showcasing improved instruction-following ability and in-context learning. We also optimize OpenFlamingo's implementation for researchers, democratizing the required training resources from 1times A100 GPU to 4times RTX-3090 GPUs, and integrate both OpenFlamingo and Otter into Huggingface Transformers for more researchers to incorporate the models into their customized training and inference pipelines.

Recent work has shown that fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on large-scale instruction-following datasets substantially improves their performance on a wide range of NLP tasks, especially in the zero-shot setting. However, even advanced instruction-tuned LLMs still fail to outperform small LMs on relation extraction (RE), a fundamental information extraction task. We hypothesize that instruction-tuning has been unable to elicit strong RE capabilities in LLMs due to RE's low incidence in instruction-tuning datasets, making up less than 1% of all tasks (Wang et al., 2022). To address this limitation, we propose QA4RE, a framework that aligns RE with question answering (QA), a predominant task in instruction-tuning datasets. Comprehensive zero-shot RE experiments over four datasets with two series of instruction-tuned LLMs (six LLMs in total) demonstrate that our QA4RE framework consistently improves LLM performance, strongly verifying our hypothesis and enabling LLMs to outperform strong zero-shot baselines by a large margin. Additionally, we provide thorough experiments and discussions to show the robustness, few-shot effectiveness, and strong transferability of our QA4RE framework. This work illustrates a promising way of adapting LLMs to challenging and underrepresented tasks by aligning these tasks with more common instruction-tuning tasks like QA.

Instruction-finetuned code language models (LMs) have shown promise in various programming tasks. They are trained, using a language modeling objective, on natural language instructions and gold code snippet pairs. Recent evidence suggests that these models, never exposed to incorrect solutions during training, often struggle to distinguish between correct and incorrect solutions. This observation raises our inquiry: Can preference learning, which trains models to prefer correct solutions over incorrect ones, help push the boundaries of code LMs even further? We propose PLUM, a novel preference learning framework augmented with test cases tailored for code LMs.PLUM aims to investigate the key success factors and potential benefits of preference learning in code LMs, which remain elusive despite its success in aligning LMs with human values. PLUM consists of three stages: (1) Generating test cases for natural language instructions, (2) sampling candidate solutions from the policy and evaluating them against the test cases to create a preference dataset, which is then used to (3) train the policy with a preference learning algorithm. Experiments demonstrate that PLUM substantially improves the performance of existing code LMs on established code generation benchmarks such as HumanEval (+) and MBPP (+), even for the state-of-the-art open-source language model CodeQwen-1.5-7B-Chat. PLUM complements the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stage, demonstrating synergistic effects.

We introduce Generalized Instruction Tuning (called GLAN), a general and scalable method for instruction tuning of Large Language Models (LLMs). Unlike prior work that relies on seed examples or existing datasets to construct instruction tuning data, GLAN exclusively utilizes a pre-curated taxonomy of human knowledge and capabilities as input and generates large-scale synthetic instruction data across all disciplines. Specifically, inspired by the systematic structure in human education system, we build the taxonomy by decomposing human knowledge and capabilities to various fields, sub-fields and ultimately, distinct disciplines semi-automatically, facilitated by LLMs. Subsequently, we generate a comprehensive list of subjects for every discipline and proceed to design a syllabus tailored to each subject, again utilizing LLMs. With the fine-grained key concepts detailed in every class session of the syllabus, we are able to generate diverse instructions with a broad coverage across the entire spectrum of human knowledge and skills. Extensive experiments on large language models (e.g., Mistral) demonstrate that GLAN excels in multiple dimensions from mathematical reasoning, coding, academic exams, logical reasoning to general instruction following without using task-specific training data of these tasks. In addition, GLAN allows for easy customization and new fields or skills can be added by simply incorporating a new node into our taxonomy.

Instruction-tuning is a widely adopted method of finetuning that enables large language models (LLMs) to generate output that more closely resembles human responses to natural language queries, in many cases leading to human-level performance on diverse testbeds. However, it remains unclear whether instruction-tuning truly makes LLMs more similar to how humans process language. We investigate the effect of instruction-tuning on LLM-human similarity in two ways: (1) brain alignment, the similarity of LLM internal representations to neural activity in the human language system, and (2) behavioral alignment, the similarity of LLM and human behavior on a reading task. We assess 25 vanilla and instruction-tuned LLMs across three datasets involving humans reading naturalistic stories and sentences. We discover that instruction-tuning generally enhances brain alignment by an average of 6%, but does not have a similar effect on behavioral alignment. To identify the factors underlying LLM-brain alignment, we compute correlations between the brain alignment of LLMs and various model properties, such as model size, various problem-solving abilities, and performance on tasks requiring world knowledge spanning various domains. Notably, we find a strong positive correlation between brain alignment and model size (r = 0.95), as well as performance on tasks requiring world knowledge (r = 0.81). Our results demonstrate that instruction-tuning LLMs improves both world knowledge representations and brain alignment, suggesting that mechanisms that encode world knowledge in LLMs also improve representational alignment to the human brain.