This paper explores a simple method for improving the zero-shot learning abilities of language models. We show that instruction tuning -- finetuning language models on a collection of tasks described via instructions -- substantially improves zero-shot performance on unseen tasks. We take a 137B parameter pretrained language model and instruction-tune it on over 60 NLP tasks verbalized via natural language instruction templates. We evaluate this instruction-tuned model, which we call FLAN, on unseen task types. FLAN substantially improves the performance of its unmodified counterpart and surpasses zero-shot 175B GPT-3 on 20 of 25 tasks that we evaluate. FLAN even outperforms few-shot GPT-3 by a large margin on ANLI, RTE, BoolQ, AI2-ARC, OpenbookQA, and StoryCloze. Ablation studies reveal that number of finetuning datasets, model scale, and natural language instructions are key to the success of instruction tuning.
@article{arxiv.2109.01652,
title = {Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners},
author = {Jason Wei and Maarten Bosma and Vincent Y. Zhao and Kelvin Guu and Adams Wei Yu and Brian Lester and Nan Du and Andrew M. Dai and Quoc V. Le},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.01652},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
Version 5. Find list of changes in Appendix F (page 35)