合成数据能否可靠作基准,取决于任务复杂度和模型大小。
Efficacy of Synthetic Data as a Benchmark
- 用大模型生成多源合成数据提升基准可信度
- 简单任务如意图识别可用合成数据,复杂任务不行
- 提出偏见因子指标,揭示小模型对自产数据的偏好
大规模语言模型(LLMs)已广泛用于零样本和少样本学习场景,包括生成用于训练和测试的合成数据集。然而,要可靠使用这些合成数据,必须了解其对真实世界数据的代表性。我们通过在六个数据集和三种不同NLP任务上评估通过LLM生成合成数据的有效性,发现尽管合成数据能有效捕捉简单任务(如意图分类)中各类方法的性能,但在更复杂的任务(如命名实体识别)中表现不佳。此外,我们提出一种新指标——偏见因子(bias factor),用于评估同一LLM既生成数据又执行任务时引入的偏差。研究发现,小规模模型表现出对其自身生成数据的偏向,而大规模模型则无此倾向。总体而言,合成数据作为基准的有效性因任务而异,建议实践者尽可能使用多个大模型生成的数据。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Large language models (LLMs) have enabled a range of applications in zero-shot and few-shot learning settings, including the generation of synthetic datasets for training and testing. However, to reliably use these synthetic datasets, it is essential to understand how representative they are of real-world data. We investigate this by assessing the effectiveness of generating synthetic data through LLM and using it as a benchmark for various NLP tasks. Our experiments across six datasets, and three different tasks, show that while synthetic data can effectively capture performance of various methods for simpler tasks, such as intent classification, it falls short for more complex tasks like named entity recognition. Additionally, we propose a new metric called the bias factor, which evaluates the biases introduced when the same LLM is used to both generate benchmarking data and to perform the tasks. We find that smaller LLMs exhibit biases towards their own generated data, whereas larger models do not. Overall, our findings suggest that the effectiveness of synthetic data as a benchmark varies depending on the task, and that practitioners should rely on data generated from multiple larger models whenever possible.
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