Super-NaturalInstructions: Generalization via Declarative Instructions on 1600+ NLP Tasks
Abstract
How well can NLP models generalize to a variety of unseen tasks when provided with task instructions? To address this question, we first introduce Super-NaturalInstructions, a benchmark of 1,616 diverse NLP tasks and their expert-written instructions. Our collection covers 76 distinct task types, including but not limited to classification, extraction, infilling, sequence tagging, text rewriting, and text composition. This large and diverse collection of tasks enables rigorous benchmarking of cross-task generalization under instructions -- training models to follow instructions on a subset of tasks and evaluating them on the remaining unseen ones. Furthermore, we build Tk-Instruct, a transformer model trained to follow a variety of in-context instructions (plain language task definitions or k-shot examples). Our experiments show that Tk-Instruct outperforms existing instruction-following models such as InstructGPT by over 9% on our benchmark despite being an order of magnitude smaller. We further analyze generalization as a function of various scaling parameters, such as the number of observed tasks, the number of instances per task, and model sizes. We hope our dataset and model facilitate future progress towards more general-purpose NLP models.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2204.07705,
title = {Super-NaturalInstructions: Generalization via Declarative Instructions on 1600+ NLP Tasks},
author = {Yizhong Wang and Swaroop Mishra and Pegah Alipoormolabashi and Yeganeh Kordi and Amirreza Mirzaei and Anjana Arunkumar and Arjun Ashok and Arut Selvan Dhanasekaran and Atharva Naik and David Stap and Eshaan Pathak and Giannis Karamanolakis and Haizhi Gary Lai and Ishan Purohit and Ishani Mondal and Jacob Anderson and Kirby Kuznia and Krima Doshi and Maitreya Patel and Kuntal Kumar Pal and Mehrad Moradshahi and Mihir Parmar and Mirali Purohit and Neeraj Varshney and Phani Rohitha Kaza and Pulkit Verma and Ravsehaj Singh Puri and Rushang Karia and Shailaja Keyur Sampat and Savan Doshi and Siddhartha Mishra and Sujan Reddy and Sumanta Patro and Tanay Dixit and Xudong Shen and Chitta Baral and Yejin Choi and Noah A. Smith and Hannaneh Hajishirzi and Daniel Khashabi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.07705},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
Accepted to EMNLP 2022, 25 pages