Traditional supervised learning mostly works on individual tasks and requires training on a large set of task-specific examples. This paradigm seriously hinders the development of task generalization since preparing a task-specific example set is costly. To build a system that can quickly and easily generalize to new tasks, task instructions have been adopted as an emerging trend of supervision recently. These instructions give the model the definition of the task and allow the model to output the appropriate answer based on the instructions and inputs. However, task instructions are often expressed in different forms, which can be interpreted from two threads: first, some instructions are short sentences and are pretrained language model (PLM) oriented, such as prompts, while other instructions are paragraphs and are human-oriented, such as those in Amazon MTurk; second, different end-users very likely explain the same task with instructions of different textual expressions. A robust system for task generalization should be able to handle any new tasks regardless of the variability of instructions. However, the system robustness in dealing with instruction-driven task generalization is still unexplored. This work investigates the system robustness when the instructions of new tasks are (i) maliciously manipulated, (ii) paraphrased, or (iii) from different levels of conciseness. To our knowledge, this is the first work that systematically studies how robust a PLM is when it is supervised by instructions with different factors of variability.

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.

本文探讨了提高语言模型的零次学习能力的简单方法。我们表明，指令调整 - 通过对说明书中所述的任务集合微调语言模型 - 大幅提升零射门上看不见任务中的表现。我们采取预训练的语言模型和指令调整它通过自然语言指令模板语言表达了60NLP任务137B参数。我们评估这种指令调整模型，我们称之为FLAN，在看不见的任务类型。FLAN显着改善其未修饰的对应的性能和超过25的20个任务，我们评估零射门175BGPT-3。FLAN甚至GPT-3通过在安利，RTE，BoolQ，AI2-ARC，OpenbookQA和StoryCloze大比分胜过几拍。消融研究显示任务和模型的规模，这个数字是指令调整取得成功的关键组成部分。

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.

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.

We introduce INSTRUCTOR, a new method for computing text embeddings given task instructions: every text input is embedded together with instructions explaining the use case (e.g., task and domain descriptions). Unlike encoders from prior work that are more specialized, INSTRUCTOR is a single embedder that can generate text embeddings tailored to different downstream tasks and domains, without any further training. We first annotate instructions for 330 diverse tasks and train INSTRUCTOR on this multitask mixture with a contrastive loss. We evaluate INSTRUCTOR on 70 embedding evaluation tasks (66 of which are unseen during training), ranging from classification and information retrieval to semantic textual similarity and text generation evaluation. INSTRUCTOR, while having an order of magnitude fewer parameters than the previous best model, achieves state-of-the-art performance, with an average improvement of 3.4% compared to the previous best results on the 70 diverse datasets. Our analysis suggests that INSTRUCTOR is robust to changes in instructions, and that instruction finetuning mitigates the challenge of training a single model on diverse datasets.

As the performance of large language models rapidly improves, benchmarks are getting larger and more complex as well. We present LMentry, a benchmark that avoids this "arms race" by focusing on a compact set of tasks that are trivial to humans, e.g. writing a sentence containing a specific word, identifying which words in a list belong to a specific category, or choosing which of two words is longer. LMentry is specifically designed to provide quick and interpretable insights into the capabilities and robustness of large language models. Our experiments reveal a wide variety of failure cases that, while immediately obvious to humans, pose a considerable challenge for large language models, including OpenAI's latest 175B-parameter instruction-tuned model, TextDavinci002. LMentry complements contemporary evaluation approaches of large language models, providing a quick, automatic, and easy-to-run "unit test", without resorting to large benchmark suites of complex tasks.

少量学习时，基于及时的方法很强劲。然而，Perez等人。 （2021年）最近对他们的表现产生了疑问，因为它们难以在“真实”的几次拍摄设置中获得良好的结果，其中提示和超级参数无法在DEV集上调整。鉴于此，我们对PET进行了广泛的研究，该方法将文本指令与基于示例的FENETUNING结合起来。我们表明，如果正确配置，宠物在真正的几次拍摄设置中强烈执行，即，没有开发装置。这对这种强大的表现至关重要是宠物智能处理多个提示的能力。然后，我们通过在RAFT上运行PET来将我们的调查结果置于真实世界的测试中，直接从现实的NLP应用程序采取的任务的基准，没有标记的开发或测试集。宠物在筏上实现了新的艺术状态，并且在11个任务中靠近非专家人类进行了近距离进行。这些结果表明，基于及时的学习者像宠物Excel这样的真正的几次拍摄学习和支持我们的信念，即从指示中学习的信念将在人类少量学习能力的路径上发挥重要作用。

Language models have recently achieved strong performance across a wide range of NLP benchmarks. However, unlike benchmarks, real world tasks are often poorly specified, and agents must deduce the user's intended behavior from a combination of context, instructions, and examples. We investigate how both humans and models behave in the face of such task ambiguity by proposing AmbiBench, a new benchmark of six ambiguously-specified classification tasks. We evaluate humans and models on AmbiBench by seeing how well they identify the intended task using 1) instructions with varying degrees of ambiguity, and 2) different numbers of labeled examples. We find that the combination of model scaling (to 175B parameters) and training with human feedback data enables models to approach or exceed the accuracy of human participants across tasks, but that either one alone is not sufficient. In addition, we show how to dramatically improve the accuracy of language models trained without large-scale human feedback training by finetuning on a small number of ambiguous in-context examples, providing a promising direction for teaching models to generalize well in the face of ambiguity.

Finetuning language models on a collection of datasets phrased as instructions has been shown to improve model performance and generalization to unseen tasks. In this paper we explore instruction finetuning with a particular focus on (1) scaling the number of tasks, (2) scaling the model size, and (3) finetuning on chain-of-thought data. We find that instruction finetuning with the above aspects dramatically improves performance on a variety of model classes (PaLM, T5, U-PaLM), prompting setups (zero-shot, few-shot, CoT), and evaluation benchmarks (MMLU, BBH, TyDiQA, MGSM, open-ended generation). For instance, Flan-PaLM 540B instruction-finetuned on 1.8K tasks outperforms PALM 540B by a large margin (+9.4% on average). Flan-PaLM 540B achieves state-of-the-art performance on several benchmarks, such as 75.2% on five-shot MMLU. We also publicly release Flan-T5 checkpoints, which achieve strong few-shot performance even compared to much larger models, such as PaLM 62B. Overall, instruction finetuning is a general method for improving the performance and usability of pretrained language models.

表问题回答（TQA）是一项重要但不足的任务。大多数现有的QA数据集都采用非结构化文本格式，只有很少的数据集使用表作为上下文。据我们所知，在生物医学领域中，没有任何TQA数据集存在经常用于提供信息的生物医学领域。在本文中，我们首先使用22个模板和关于鉴别诊断的生物医学教科书中的上下文来回答数据集Biotabqa的桌子问题。 Biotabqa不仅可以用来教授模型如何从表中回答问题，还可以评估模型如何推广到看不见的问题，这是生物医学应用的重要情况。为了实现概括评估，我们将模板分为17个培训和5个跨任务评估。然后，我们使用BioTABQA上的单个和多任务学习开发两个基准。此外，我们探索教学学习，这是一种显示出令人印象深刻的概括性能的技术。实验结果表明，我们的指导调整模型在各种评估设置中平均比单一和多任务基准平均比单一和多任务基准，更重要的是，更重要的是，指令调整的模型在交叉任务上的基准比5％ 。

最近已被证明大型语言模型在各种任务集中获得合理的零射普通化（Brown等，2020）。它已经假设这是语言模型的隐式多任务学习的结果，在语言模型中的预押（Radford等，2019）。可以通过明确的多任务学习直接引起零拍常规化？为了以缩放测试这个问题，我们开发一个系统，以便轻松地将任何自然语言任务映射到人类可读的提示表单中。我们转换一组大量的监督数据集，每个数据集都有多个提示，具有不同的措辞。这些提示的数据集允许基准测试模型执行完全看不见的任务的能力。我们介绍了一个普拉克尔编码器 - 解码器模型（Raffel等，2020; Lester等，2021），覆盖各种任务。该模型在多个标准数据集中达到强大的零点性能，通常优于其尺寸的型号超过16倍。此外，我们的方法对来自Big-替补基准测试的任务子集具有强烈性能，优于其尺寸的6倍。所有提示和培训的型号都可以在https://github.com/ bigscience-workshop / protectsource / httpsource / https：//huggingface.co/bigscience/t0pp。

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's still not explored for vision and multimodal tasks. In this work, we introduce MultiInstruct, the first multimodal instruction tuning benchmark dataset that consists of 47 diverse multimodal tasks covering 11 broad categories. Each task is designed at least with 5,000 instances (input-out pairs) from existing open-source datasets and 5 expert-written instructions. We take OFA as the base pre-trained model for multimodal instruction tuning, and to improve its performance, we explore multiple transfer learning strategies to leverage the large-scale Natural Instructions dataset. Experimental results demonstrate its strong zero-shot performance on various unseen multimodal tasks and the benefit of transfer learning from text-only instructions. We also design a new evaluation metric: Sensitivity, to evaluate how sensitive the model is to the variety of instructions. Our results indicate that the model is less sensitive to the varying instructions after finetuning on a diverse set of tasks and instructions for each task.

预测任务标签和为其预测生成自由文本阐述的自律化模型可以实现与NLP系统更直观的交互。然而，这些模型目前正在接受大量人为的自由文本解释，每个任务都会阻碍更广泛的使用。我们建议使用少数培训例子研究更现实的自律化建立。我们出示2月 - 一个标准化的四个现有英语数据集和相关指标。我们通过2月份广泛探索自然语言提示来确定正确的提示方法。然后，通过使用此提示并缩放模型大小，我们证明了几次拍摄自合合理化的进展。我们展示了这项任务的完善房间仍然有充足的改进空间：人类注册人评估的生成解释的平均合理性最多为51％，而人类解释的合理性是76％。我们希望2月份与我们的拟议方法一起促使社区承担几次拍摄的自我合理化挑战。

Code generation models have achieved impressive performance. However, they tend to be brittle as slight edits to a prompt could lead to very different generations; these robustness properties, critical for user experience when deployed in real-life applications, are not well understood. Most existing works on robustness in text or code tasks have focused on classification, while robustness in generation tasks is an uncharted area and to date there is no comprehensive benchmark for robustness in code generation. In this paper, we propose ReCode, a comprehensive robustness evaluation benchmark for code generation models. We customize over 30 transformations specifically for code on docstrings, function and variable names, code syntax, and code format. They are carefully designed to be natural in real-life coding practice, preserve the original semantic meaning, and thus provide multifaceted assessments of a model's robustness performance. With human annotators, we verified that over 90% of the perturbed prompts do not alter the semantic meaning of the original prompt. In addition, we define robustness metrics for code generation models considering the worst-case behavior under each type of perturbation, taking advantage of the fact that executing the generated code can serve as objective evaluation. We demonstrate ReCode on SOTA models using HumanEval, MBPP, as well as function completion tasks derived from them. Interesting observations include: better robustness for CodeGen over InCoder and GPT-J; models are most sensitive to syntax perturbations; more challenging robustness evaluation on MBPP over HumanEval.

大规模的预训练语言模型在广泛的自然语言理解（NLU）任务中取得了巨大的成功，甚至超过人类性能。然而，最近的研究表明，这些模型的稳健性可能受到精心制作的文本对抗例子的挑战。虽然已经提出了几个单独的数据集来评估模型稳健性，但仍缺少原则和全面的基准。在本文中，我们呈现对抗性胶水（AdvGlue），这是一个新的多任务基准，以定量和彻底探索和评估各种对抗攻击下现代大规模语言模型的脆弱性。特别是，我们系统地应用14种文本对抗的攻击方法来构建一个粘合的援助，这是由人类进一步验证的可靠注释。我们的调查结果总结如下。 （i）大多数现有的对抗性攻击算法容易发生无效或暧昧的对手示例，其中大约90％的含量改变原始语义含义或误导性的人的注册人。因此，我们执行仔细的过滤过程来策划高质量的基准。 （ii）我们测试的所有语言模型和强大的培训方法在AdvGlue上表现不佳，差价远远落后于良性准确性。我们希望我们的工作能够激励开发新的对抗攻击，这些攻击更加隐身，更加统一，以及针对复杂的对抗性攻击的新强大语言模型。 Advglue在https://adversarialglue.github.io提供。

由于面向任务对话框（TOD）系统中不同模块的标签成本很高，但实践中的主要挑战是学习具有最少标记数据的不同任务。最近，通过预先训练的语言模型（PLMS）提示方法对TOD的几次射门学习显示了有希望的结果。为了更好地利用PLMS的力量，本文提出了利用额外任务特定指令的全面指导（CINS）。我们在TOD中设计了指令的架构（定义，约束，提示）指令及其定制实现，即在TOD中的三个重要下游任务，即意图分类，对话状态跟踪和自然语言生成。采用序列到序列模型（T5）来解决统一框架中的这三个任务。在具有小验证数据的现实少量学习场景中对这些TOD任务进行了广泛的实验。经验结果表明，所提出的CINS方法一致地改善了Finetune PLM具有原始输入或简短提示的技术。

迄今为止对文本生成的评估主要集中在依次创建的内容上，而不是对文本的改进。但是，写作自然是一个迭代和增量过程，需要在不同的模块化技能上进行专业知识，例如修复过时的信息或使样式更加一致。即便如此，对模型执行这些技能和编辑能力的模型能力的全面评估仍然很少。这项工作介绍了EditeVal：基于指导的，基准和评估套件，该套件利用现有的现有和新数据集自动评估编辑功能，例如使文本更具凝聚力和释义。我们评估了几种预训练的模型，这表明指令和同伴表现最好，但是大多数基准都落在监督的SOTA以下，尤其是在中和和更新信息时。我们的分析还表明，用于编辑任务的常用指标并不总是很好地关联，并且对具有最高性能的提示的优化并不一定带来对不同模型的最强鲁棒性。通过发布此基准和公开可用的排行榜挑战，我们希望在开发能够迭代和更可控制的编辑模型中解锁未来的研究。

通过自我监督的学习预先训练的大型语言模型在各种各样的任务上表现出令人印象深刻的零击功能。在这项工作中，我们介绍了Welm：一种针对中文的精心读取的预训练的语言模型，能够无缝执行不同类型的任务，以零或几次演示。 Welm通过“阅读”涵盖广泛主题的精选高质量语料库来接受10b参数的培训。我们表明，韦尔姆拥有有关各种领域和语言的广泛知识。在18个单语（中文）任务中，WELM可以大大优于现有的预训练模型，尺寸相似，并匹配高达25倍大的模型的性能。韦尔姆还表现出强大的多种语言和代码转换理解的能力，优于预先对30种语言进行预培训的现有多语言模型。此外，我们收集了人工编写的提示，并通过多次培训进行了大量的中文和微调韦尔姆的监督数据集。最终的模型可以实现对看不见的任务类型的强烈概括，并在零射门学习中优于无监督的韦尔姆。最后，我们证明韦尔姆具有解释和校准自己的决策的基本技能，这可能是未来研究的有希望的方向。我们的模型可以从https://welm.weixin.qq.com/docs/api/应用。

We study the problem of retrieval with instructions, where users of a retrieval system explicitly describe their intent along with their queries. We aim to develop a general-purpose task-aware retrieval system using multi-task instruction tuning, which can follow human-written instructions to find the best documents for a given query. We introduce the first large-scale collection of approximately 40 retrieval datasets with instructions, BERRI, and present TART, a multi-task retrieval system trained on BERRI with instructions. TART shows strong capabilities to adapt to a new retrieval task via instructions and advances the state of the art on two zero-shot retrieval benchmarks, BEIR and LOTTE, outperforming models up to three times larger. We further introduce a new evaluation setup, X^2-Retrieval to better reflect real-world scenarios, where diverse domains and tasks are pooled and a system needs to find documents aligning users' intents. In this setup, TART significantly outperforms competitive baselines, further demonstrating the effectiveness of guiding retrieval with instructions.