Let’s Synthesize Step by Step: Iterative Dataset Synthesis with Large Language Models by Extrapolating Errors from Small Models

Ruida Wang, Wangchunshu Zhou, Mrinmaya Sachan

Abstract
*Data Synthesis* is a promising way to train a small model with very little labeled data. One approach for data synthesis is to leverage the rich knowledge from large language models to synthesize pseudo training examples for small models, making it possible to achieve both data and compute efficiency at the same time. However, a key challenge in data synthesis is that the synthesized dataset often suffers from a large distributional discrepancy from the *real task* data distribution. Thus, in this paper, we propose *Synthesis Step by Step* (**S3**), a data synthesis framework that shrinks this distribution gap by iteratively extrapolating the errors made by a small model trained on the synthesized dataset on a small real-world validation dataset using a large language model. Extensive experiments on multiple NLP tasks show that our approach improves the performance of a small model by reducing the gap between the synthetic dataset and the real data, resulting in significant improvement compared to several baselines: 9.48% improvement compared to ZeroGen and 2.73% compared to GoldGen, and at most 15.17% improvement compared to the small model trained on human-annotated data.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.791
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11817–11831
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.791
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.791
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ruida Wang, Wangchunshu Zhou, and Mrinmaya Sachan. 2023. Let’s Synthesize Step by Step: Iterative Dataset Synthesis with Large Language Models by Extrapolating Errors from Small Models. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 11817–11831, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Let’s Synthesize Step by Step: Iterative Dataset Synthesis with Large Language Models by Extrapolating Errors from Small Models (Wang et al., Findings 2023)
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