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Paper · 2402.04833 · NeurIPS · 2024

Long Is More for Alignment: A Simple but Tough-to-Beat Baseline for Instruction Fine-Tuning

Francesco Croce, Maksym Andriushchenko, Nicolas Flammarion, Hao Zhao

arXiv · PDF · Open in the Atlas

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We lifted 2 functions out of this paper's own repositories and ran 2 of them in a sandbox. "Ran" means the function executed on a synthesized input and returned a value. It is not a reproduction of the paper's results.

RepositoryRoleRan
tml-epfl/long-is-more-for-alignment canonical 1 of 1
copy not recorded — 1 of 1
FunctionStatusWhere it lives
gen_prompt Ran tml-epfl/long-is-more-for-alignment/evaluation/evaluation_gpt4.py
pointer only (licence: NONE) · get_code("36c101b773eb28ed")
parse_score Ran this paper's copy was not recorded; identical code first harvested from artidoro/qlora
pointer only · get_code("8049b382893c73dd")

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Abstract

There is a consensus that instruction fine-tuning of LLMs requires high-quality data, but what are they? LIMA (NeurIPS 2023) and AlpaGasus (ICLR 2024) are state-of-the-art methods for selecting such high-quality examples, either via manual curation or using GPT-3.5-Turbo as a quality scorer. We show that the extremely simple baseline of selecting the 1,000 instructions with longest responses-that intuitively contain more learnable information and are harder to overfitfrom standard datasets can consistently outperform these sophisticated methods according to GPT-4 and PaLM-2 as judges, while remaining competitive on the Open LLM benchmarks that test factual knowledge. We demonstrate this for several LLMs (Llama-2-7B, Llama-2-13B, Mistral-7B-v0.1) and datasets (Alpaca-52k, Evol-Instruct-70k). In addition, a lightweight refinement of such long instructions can further improve the abilities of the fine-tuned LLMs, and allows us to obtain competitive results on MT-Bench and the 2nd highest-ranked Llama-2-7B-based model on AlpacaEval 2.0, while training on only 1,000 examples and no extra preference data. We also conduct a thorough analysis of our models to ensure that their enhanced performance is not simply due to GPT-4's preference for longer responses. Overall, our findings suggest that fine-tuning on the longest responses should be the default baseline for any work on instruction fine-tuning. We provide our code in this GitHub repository.

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