Posted by Maarten Bosma, Research Engineer and Jason Wei, AI Resident, Google Research
For a machine learning model to generate meaningful text, it must have a large amount of knowledge about the world as well as the ability to abstract. While language models that are trained to do this are increasingly able to automatically acquire this knowledge as they scale, how to best unlock this knowledge and apply it to specific real-world tasks is not clear.
One well-established technique for doing this is called fine-tuning, which is training a pretrained model such as BERT and T5 on a labeled dataset to adapt it to a downstream task. However, fine-tuning requires a large number of training examples, along with stored model weights for each downstream task, which is not always practical, particularly for large models.
In “Fine-tuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners”, we explore a simple technique called instruction fine-tuning, or instruction tuning for short. This involves fine-tuning a model not to solve a specific task, but to make it more amenable to solving NLP tasks in general. We use instruction tuning to train a model, which we call Fine-tuned LAnguage Net (FLAN). Because the instruction tuning phase of FLAN only takes a small number of updates compared to the large amount of computation involved in pre-training the model, it’s the metaphorical dessert to the main course of pretraining. This enables FLAN to perform various unseen tasks.
An illustration of how FLAN works: The model is fine-tuned on disparate sets of instructions and generalizes to unseen instructions. As more types of tasks are added to the fine-tuning data model performance improves.
Background
One recent popular technique for using language models to solve tasks is called zero-shot or few-shot prompting. This technique formulates a task based on text that a language model might have seen during training, where then the language model generates
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