Work

Instruction Induction: From Few Examples to Natural Language Task Descriptions

Year: 2023
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Large language models are able to perform a task by conditioning on a few input-output demonstrations -a paradigm known as incontext learning.We show that language models can explicitly infer an underlying task from a few demonstrations by prompting them to generate a natural language instruction that fits the examples.To explore this ability, we introduce the instruction induction challenge, compile a dataset consisting of 24 tasks, and define a novel evaluation metric based on executing the generated instruction.We discover that, to a large extent, the ability to generate instructions does indeed emerge when using a model that is both large enough and aligned to follow instructions; InstructGPT achieves 65.7% of human performance in our execution-based metric, while the original GPT-3 model reaches only 9.8% of human performance.This surprising result suggests that instruction induction might be a viable learning paradigm in and of itself, where instead of fitting a set of latent continuous parameters to the data, one searches for the best description in the natural language hypothesis space. 1
Language: English
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4385571789
FWCI: 11.51
Cites: 40
Cited by: 66
Related to: 10