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LaMini-LM: A Diverse Herd of Distilled Models from Large-Scale Instructions

Paper · 2023 · Minghao Wu, Abdul Waheed, Chiyu Zhang et al.

Summary

Instruction-tuned LLMs perform well but are costly to train and serve. Earlier distillation projects, such as Alpaca-style efforts, used small and narrow datasets, typically released a single 7B–13B model, and evaluated it only briefly. This paper builds LaMini-LM by sequence-level (offline) distillation from gpt-3.5-turbo into much smaller student models.

The authors first create the LaMini instruction dataset, with 2.58M instruction–response pairs:

  • Prompts come from self-instruct, P3, FLAN and Alpaca.
  • The teacher writes new instructions modeled on a few sampled examples.
  • Further instructions are seeded with filtered Wikipedia categories to broaden topical coverage.
  • The teacher then answers every instruction.

On this data they fine-tune encoder-decoder and decoder-only models from 61M to 7B parameters. Evaluation covers 15 NLP benchmarks, human judgments, a newly built hallucination probe and a toxicity test. The distilled models roughly match Alpaca while being far smaller. This makes instruction-following models more practical where compute is limited, although hallucination and weak reasoning remain unsolved.

Key points

  • Dataset size and sources: The LaMini instruction dataset has 2.58M examples, about 50× the Alpaca release. Responses come from gpt-3.5-turbo-0301.
  • Topic-guided generation: The authors collected 2.2M Wikipedia categories. They kept those with fewer than three words, more than 10 sub-categories and 50 pages.
  • Model family: 6 encoder-decoder and 11 decoder-only models (61M–7B), built on T5/Flan-T5, GPT-2, Cerebras-GPT, GPT-Neo and LLaMA.
  • Hallucination and toxicity tests:
    • The hallucination set has 40 handcrafted questions. Open-source models struggle most with questions about events that never happened and with nonsense questions.
    • Toxicity was measured on 1K non-toxic and 1K toxic RealToxicityPrompts, scored with the OpenAI Moderation API.
    • Decoder-only models became less toxic after tuning (LLaMA-7B: 138 toxic outputs → LaMini-LLaMA-7B: 71). The smaller Flan-T5 variants became more toxic (e.g., Flan-T5-base: 30 → LaMini-Flan-T5-248M: 51).
  • Limitations: The models handle single-turn dialogue only. They inherit the teacher's errors and do poorly on coding, math and logical reasoning.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

 Fields, topics and concepts

Cite

Cite as Minghao Wu, Abdul Waheed, Chiyu Zhang, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed and Alham Fikri Aji. 2023. LaMini-LM: A Diverse Herd of Distilled Models from Large-Scale Instructions. arXiv:2304.14402.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.48550/arxiv.2304.14402 · arXiv 2304.14402

@misc{wu2023lamini,
  title = {{LaMini-LM: A Diverse Herd of Distilled Models from Large-Scale Instructions}},
  author = {Minghao Wu, Abdul Waheed, Chiyu Zhang, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed and Alham Fikri Aji},
  year = {2023},
  doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2304.14402},
  eprint = {2304.14402},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2304.14402}
}

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