Large Language Model as Attributed Training Data Generator: A Tale of Diversity and Bias
Written for the Research library (claude-opus-5-5) from the paper text, in our own words: the license "arXiv — non-exclusive license to distribute" does not allow redistributing the text itself. Original — arxiv.org/pdf/2306.15895
Summary
The paper asks how the prompts used to have an LLM synthesize classification training data affect the diversity and bias of that data. Prior work mostly used plain class-conditional queries (called SimPrompt). The authors show that these yield skewed and repetitive data. They propose AttrPrompt: the LLM first helps identify attribute dimensions such as subtopic, length, style and location, along with their possible values, in a semi-automated loop with limited human input. Random combinations of these values then fill the generation prompts. Using ChatGPT (gpt-3.5-turbo), they test on four topic-classification datasets with many classes and strong class imbalance. Models trained on AttrPrompt data beat SimPrompt models, both on synthetic data alone and when it is mixed with real training data. AttrPrompt also matches SimPrompt while spending only about 5% of the API budget. It works as an add-on to existing generation pipelines and extends to multi-label classification. The work matters because it shows that attribute diversity, not just data volume, drives the usefulness of synthetic data.
Key points
- Benchmarks: NYT (26 classes), Amazon (23), Reddit (45) and StackExchange (50), with imbalance ratios between 155.6 and 1283.7.
- Regional bias: An attribute classifier found that SimPrompt news about NYT topics was 68.01% located in North America and only 0.69% in Africa. Prompts with fixed attributes also underperformed prompts with randomly sampled ones.
- Plug-in use: AttrPrompt improved SuperGen, SunGen, ProGen and ReGen. For ReGen on fine-grained tasks, the absolute gains reached 14–26 points.
- Multi-label extension: On the arXiv dataset with 98 classes, Micro-F1 rose from 26.75 (SimPrompt) to 37.88 (AttrPrompt), against 58.22 for gold data. Generation cost per 1k samples was nearly the same.
- Release and limitations: The generated datasets and prompts are released at github.com/yueyu1030/AttrPrompt. Limitations include the focus on text classification only, reliance on label names, some manual effort in defining attributes, and the risk of hallucinated content.
Cited by
- On LLMs-Driven Synthetic Data Generation, Curation, and Evaluation: A Survey
- Aya Dataset: An Open-Access Collection for Multilingual Instruction Tuning
- Aligning Large Language Models with Human: A Survey
Cite
@misc{yu2023large,
title = {{Large Language Model as Attributed Training Data Generator: A Tale of Diversity and Bias}},
author = {Yu, Yue and Zhuang, Yuchen and Zhang, Jieyu and Meng, Yu and Ratner, Alexander and Krishna, Ranjay and Shen, Jiaming and Zhang, Chao},
year = {2023},
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2306.15895},
eprint = {2306.15895},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2306.15895}
}References
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