用对比解码分离指令遵循与预训练知识,提升指令微调数据质量。
Synthesizing Instruction-Tuning Datasets with Contrastive Decoding

- 通过对比后训练模型与预训练模型生成响应,抑制共有的世界知识。
- 使用CoDIT构建的数据集使模型在多个基准上表现更优。
- 方法可跨架构迁移指令微调能力,适合追求泛化性能的研究者。
利用高性能大语言模型生成的响应进行指令微调已成为普遍做法。然而,现有研究忽略了大语言模型生成结果的一个特性:其同时融合了预训练阶段获得的世界知识和后训练阶段习得的指令遵循能力。我们假设,将指令遵循能力从预训练知识中分离,可提升指令微调效果。为此,提出CoDIT方法,在生成过程中对后训练模型与其预训练版本进行对比解码,抑制两者共享的预训练知识,同时增强后训练阶段获取的指令遵循行为,从而生成更纯粹反映指令遵循能力的响应。实验表明,基于CoDIT构建的数据集训练出的模型,在多个基准上均优于直接生成响应训练的模型,且性能超越现有公开指令微调数据集。此外,理论与实证分析表明,CoDIT可被解释为将参数空间中的聊天向量迁移到文本空间,实现不同架构模型间指令微调能力的传递。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Using responses generated by high-performing large language models (LLMs) for instruction tuning has become a widely adopted approach. However, the existing literature overlooks a property of LLM-generated responses: they conflate world knowledge acquired during pre-training with instruction-following capabilities acquired during post-training. We hypothesize that disentangling the instruction-following capabilities from pre-trained knowledge improves the effectiveness of instruction tuning. To this end, we propose CoDIT, a method that applies contrastive decoding between a post-trained model and its pre-trained counterpart during response generation. The method suppresses pre-trained knowledge shared between the two models while amplifying the instruction-following behavior acquired via post-training, resulting in responses that more purely reflect instruction-following capabilities. Experiment results demonstrate that models trained on datasets constructed via CoDIT consistently outperform those trained on directly generated responses. Training on our datasets also yields better performance than on existing publicly available instruction-tuning datasets across multiple benchmarks. Furthermore, we theoretically and empirically show that CoDIT can be interpreted as distilling the chat vector from parameter space to text space, enabling the transfer of instruction-tuning capabilities across models of different architectures.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。