Papers › NEFTune: Noisy Embeddings Improve Instruction Finetuning

NEFTune: Noisy Embeddings Improve Instruction Finetuning

9 Oct 2023arXiv:2310.05914archive 2025-07-28

Neel Jain, Ping-Yeh Chiang, Yuxin Wen, John Kirchenbauer, Hong-Min Chu, Gowthami Somepalli, Brian R. Bartoldson, Bhavya Kailkhura, Avi Schwarzschild, Aniruddha Saha, Micah Goldblum, Jonas Geiping, Tom Goldstein

We show that language model finetuning can be improved, sometimes dramatically, with a simple augmentation. NEFTune adds noise to the embedding vectors during training. Standard finetuning of LLaMA-2-7B using Alpaca achieves 29.79% on AlpacaEval, which rises to 64.69% using noisy embeddings. NEFTune also improves over strong baselines on modern instruction datasets. Models trained with Evol-Instruct see a 10% improvement, with ShareGPT an 8% improvement, and with OpenPlatypus an 8% improvement. Even powerful models further refined with RLHF such as LLaMA-2-Chat benefit from additional training with NEFTune.

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