Did You Read the Instructions? Rethinking the Effectiveness of Task Definitions in Instruction Learning
Fan Yin, Jesse Vig, Philippe Laban, Shafiq Joty, Caiming Xiong, Chien-Sheng Wu
Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance in following natural language instructions to solve unseen tasks. However, it remains unclear whether models truly understand task definitions and whether the human-written definitions are optimal. In this paper, we systematically study the role of task definitions in instruction learning. We first conduct an ablation analysis informed by human annotations to understand which parts of a task definition are most important, and find that model performance only drops substantially when removing contents describing the task output, in particular label information. Next, we propose an automatic algorithm to compress task definitions to a minimal supporting set of tokens, and find that 60% of tokens can be removed while maintaining or even improving model performance. Based on these results, we propose two strategies to help models better leverage task instructions: (1) providing only key information for tasks in a common structured format, and (2) adding a meta-tuning stage to help the model better understand the definitions. With these two strategies, we achieve a 4.2 Rouge-L improvement over 119 unseen test tasks.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.acl-long.172
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Toronto, Canada
- Editors:
- Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 3063–3079
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.172
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.172
- Cite (ACL):
- Fan Yin, Jesse Vig, Philippe Laban, Shafiq Joty, Caiming Xiong, and Chien-Sheng Wu. 2023. Did You Read the Instructions? Rethinking the Effectiveness of Task Definitions in Instruction Learning. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 3063–3079, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Did You Read the Instructions? Rethinking the Effectiveness of Task Definitions in Instruction Learning (Yin et al., ACL 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/dois-2013-emnlp/2023.acl-long.172.pdf