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.
@article{arxiv.2210.11416,
title = {Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models},
author = {Hyung Won Chung and Le Hou and Shayne Longpre and Barret Zoph and Yi Tay and William Fedus and Yunxuan Li and Xuezhi Wang and Mostafa Dehghani and Siddhartha Brahma and Albert Webson and Shixiang Shane Gu and Zhuyun Dai and Mirac Suzgun and Xinyun Chen and Aakanksha Chowdhery and Alex Castro-Ros and Marie Pellat and Kevin Robinson and Dasha Valter and Sharan Narang and Gaurav Mishra and Adams Yu and Vincent Zhao and Yanping Huang and Andrew Dai and Hongkun Yu and Slav Petrov and Ed H. Chi and Jeff Dean and Jacob Devlin and Adam Roberts and Denny Zhou and Quoc V. Le and Jason Wei},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.11416},
year = {2022}
}
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Public checkpoints: https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/model_doc/flan-t5