{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/ensemble-instruct-generating-instruction","title":"Ensemble-Instruct: Generating Instruction-Tuning Data with a Heterogeneous Mixture of LMs","arxiv_id":"2310.13961","date":"2023-10-21","proceeding":null,"authors":["Young-suk Lee","Md Arafat Sultan","Yousef El-Kurdi","Tahira Naseem Asim Munawar","Radu Florian","Salim Roukos","Ramón Fernandez Astudillo"],"abstract":"Using in-context learning (ICL) for data generation, techniques such as Self-Instruct (Wang et al., 2023) or the follow-up Alpaca (Taori et al., 2023) can train strong conversational agents with only a small amount of human supervision. One limitation of these approaches is that they resort to very large language models (around 175B parameters) that are also proprietary and non-public. Here we explore the application of such techniques to language models that are much smaller (around 10B--40B parameters) and have permissive licenses. We find the Self-Instruct approach to be less effective at these sizes and propose new ICL methods that draw on two main ideas: (a) Categorization and simplification of the ICL templates to make prompt learning easier for the LM, and (b) Ensembling over multiple LM outputs to help select high-quality synthetic examples. Our algorithm leverages the 175 Self-Instruct seed tasks and employs separate pipelines for instructions that require an input and instructions that do not. Empirical investigations with different LMs show that: (1) Our proposed method yields higher-quality instruction tuning data than Self-Instruct, (2) It improves performances of both vanilla and instruction-tuned LMs by significant margins, and (3) Smaller instruction-tuned LMs generate more useful outputs than their larger un-tuned counterparts. Our codebase is available at https://github.com/IBM/ensemble-instruct.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.13961v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.13961v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"ensemble-instruct-generating-instruction","repo_url":"https://github.com/ibm/ensemble-instruct","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"Apache-2.0"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"in-context-learning","task_name":"In-Context Learning"},{"task_slug":"prompt-learning","task_name":"Prompt Learning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2310.13961","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}