Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models

• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2210.11416
• Publication Date: 2022-01-01
• Authors: Chung, Hyung Won; Hou, Le; Longpre, Shayne; Zoph, Barret; Tay, Yi; Fedus, William; Li, Yunxuan; Wang, Xuezhi; Dehghani, Mostafa; Brahma, Siddhartha; Webson, Albert; Gu, Shixiang Shane; Dai, Zhuyun; Suzgun, Mirac; Chen, Xinyun; Chowdhery, Aakanksha; Castro-Ros, Alex; Pellat, Marie; Robinson, Kevin; Valter, Dasha; Narang, Sharan; Mishra, Gaurav; Yu, Adams; Zhao, Vincent; Huang, Yanping; Dai, Andrew; Yu, Hongkun; Petrov, Slav; Chi, Ed H.; Dean, Jeff; Devlin, Jacob; Roberts, Adam; Zhou, Denny; Le, Quoc V.; Wei, Jason
• Keywords: FOS: Computer and information sciences; Computer Science - Machine Learning; Computer Science - Computation and Language; 0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering; 02 engineering and technology; Computation and Language (cs.CL); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

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.<br/>Public checkpoints: https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/model_doc/flan-t5<br/>