{"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/longform-optimizing-instruction-tuning-for","title":"LongForm: Effective Instruction Tuning with Reverse Instructions","arxiv_id":"2304.08460","date":"2023-04-17","proceeding":null,"authors":["Abdullatif Köksal","Timo Schick","Anna Korhonen","Hinrich Schütze"],"abstract":"Instruction tuning enables language models to more effectively generalize and better follow user intent. However, obtaining instruction data is costly and challenging. Prior work employs methods such as expensive human annotation, crowd-sourced datasets with alignment issues, and generating noisy examples via LLMs. We introduce the LongForm-C dataset, which is created by reverse instructions. We generate instructions via LLMs for human-written corpus examples using reverse instructions. First we select a diverse set of human-written documents from corpora such as C4 and Wikipedia; then we generate instructions for these documents via LLMs. This approach provides a cheaper and cleaner instruction-tuning dataset with natural output and one suitable for long text generation. Our models outperform 10x larger language models without instruction tuning on tasks such as story/recipe generation and long-form question answering. Moreover, LongForm models outperform prior instruction-tuned models such as FLAN-T5 and Alpaca by a large margin, and improve language understanding capabilities further. We publicly release our data and models: https://github.com/akoksal/LongForm.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.08460v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.08460v3.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":"longform-optimizing-instruction-tuning-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/akoksal/longform","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok"}},{"paper_slug":"longform-optimizing-instruction-tuning-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/youngerous/qtree","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"long-form-question-answering","task_name":"Long Form Question Answering"},{"task_slug":"news-generation","task_name":"News Generation"},{"task_slug":"question-answering","task_name":"Question Answering"},{"task_slug":"recipe-generation","task_name":"Recipe Generation"},{"task_slug":"text-generation","task_name":"Text Generation"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"adafactor","method_name":"Adafactor"},{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"attention-dropout","method_name":"Attention Dropout"},{"method_slug":"bpe","method_name":"BPE"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"dropout","method_name":"Dropout"},{"method_slug":"flan-t5","method_name":"Flan-T5"},{"method_slug":"glu","method_name":"Gated Linear Unit"},{"method_slug":"inverse-square-root-schedule","method_name":"Inverse Square Root Schedule"},{"method_slug":"layer-normalization","method_name":"Layer Normalization"},{"method_slug":"linear-layer","method_name":"Linear Layer"},{"method_slug":"multi-head-attention","method_name":"Multi-Head Attention"},{"method_slug":"opt","method_name":"OPT"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"sentencepiece","method_name":"SentencePiece"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"},{"method_slug":"t5","method_name":"T5"}],"datasets_introduced":[{"slug":"longform","name":"LongForm","full_name":""}],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2304.08460","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}