{"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/what-makes-instruction-learning-hard-an","title":"What Makes Instruction Learning Hard? An Investigation and a New Challenge in a Synthetic Environment","arxiv_id":"2204.09148","date":"2022-04-19","proceeding":null,"authors":["Matthew Finlayson","Kyle Richardson","Ashish Sabharwal","Peter Clark"],"abstract":"The instruction learning paradigm -- where a model learns to perform new tasks from task descriptions alone -- has become popular in general-purpose model research. The capabilities of large transformer models as instruction learners, however, remain poorly understood. We use a controlled synthetic environment to characterize such capabilities. Specifically, we use the task of deciding whether a given string matches a regular expression (viewed as an instruction) to identify properties of tasks, instructions, and instances that make instruction learning challenging. For instance, we find that our model, a fine-tuned T5-based text2text transformer, struggles with large regular languages, suggesting that less precise instructions are challenging for models. Additionally, instruction executions that require tracking longer contexts of prior steps are also more difficult. We use our findings to systematically construct a challenging instruction learning dataset, which we call Hard RegSet. Fine-tuning on Hard RegSet, our large transformer learns to correctly interpret only 65.6% of test instructions (with at least 90% accuracy), and 11%-24% of the instructions in out-of-distribution generalization settings. We propose Hard RegSet as a challenging instruction learning task, and a controlled environment for studying instruction learning.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.09148v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2204.09148v2.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":"what-makes-instruction-learning-hard-an","repo_url":"https://github.com/allenai/regset","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"out-of-distribution-generalization","task_name":"Out-of-Distribution Generalization"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2204.09148","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2204.09148"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/allenai/regset","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran_honours":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":1,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"0a62cf336967375b","entry":"flatten","repo":"allenai/regset","repo_kind":"official","path":"sample_v2.py","file_url":"https://github.com/allenai/regset/blob/HEAD/sample_v2.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_honours","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"HONOURS","metamorphic_tier":"well_formed","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"0a62cf336967375b"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}