We explore supervised multitask pre-training by proposing Instruction Pre-Training, a framework that scalably augments massive raw corpora with instruction-response pairs to pre-train language models. The instruction-response pairs are generated by an efficient instruction synthesizer built on open-source models. In our experiments, we synthesize 200M instruction-response pairs covering 40+ task categories to verify the effectiveness of Instruction Pre-Training. Instruction Pre-Training* outperforms Vanilla Pre-training in both general pre-training from scratch and domain-adaptive continual pre-training. In pre-training from scratch, Instruction Pre-Training not only improves pre-trained base models but also benefits more from further instruction tuning. In continual pre-training, Instruction Pre-Training enables Llama3-8B to be comparable to or even outperform Llama3-70B.

Resources

🤗 We share our data and models with example usages, feel free to open any issues or discussions! 🤗

Context-Based Instruction Synthesizer: instruction-synthesizer
Fine-Tuning Data for the Synthesizer: ft-instruction-synthesizer-collection
General Models Pre-Trained from Scratch:
- InstructLM-500M
- InstructLM-1.3B
Domain-Specific Models Pre-Trained from Llama3-8B:
- Finance-Llama3-8B
- Biomedicine-Llama3-8B

General Pre-Training From Scratch

We augment the RefinedWeb corproa with instruction-response pairs generated by our context-based instruction synthesizer to pre-train general langauge models from scratch.

To evaluate our general base model using the lm-evaluation-harness framework

Setup dependencies:

bash

git clone https://github.com/EleutherAI/lm-evaluation-harness
cd lm-evaluation-harness
pip install -e .

Evalaute:

bash

MODEL=instruction-pretrain/InstructLM-500M
add_bos_token=True # this flag is needed because lm-eval-harness set add_bos_token to False by default, but ours require add_bos_token to be True

accelerate launch -m lm_eval --model hf \
    --model_args pretrained=${MODEL},add_bos_token=${add_bos_token},dtype=float16  \
    --gen_kwargs do_sample=False \
    --tasks piqa,hellaswag,winogrande \
    --batch_size auto \
    --num_fewshot 0

accelerate launch -m lm_eval --model hf \
    --model_args pretrained=${MODEL},add_bos_token=${add_bos_token},dtype=float16 \
    --gen_kwargs do_sample=False \
    --tasks social_iqa,ai2_arc,openbookqa,boolq,mmlu \
    --batch_size auto \
    --num_fewshot 5

Model Citation

If you find our work helpful, please cite us:

AdaptLLM

bibtex

@inproceedings{
cheng2024adapting,
title={Adapting Large Language Models via Reading Comprehension},
author={Daixuan Cheng and Shaohan Huang and Furu Wei},
booktitle={The Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations},
year={2024},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=y886UXPEZ0}
}