Poster
in
Workshop: Third Workshop on Efficient Natural Language and Speech Processing (ENLSP-III): Towards the Future of Large Language Models and their Emerging Descendants
DiffTune: A Diffusion-Based Approach to Diverse Instruction-Tuning Data Generation
Suyuchen Wang · Bang Liu
Instruction tuning has become pivotal in enhancing the adaptability and responsiveness of Large Language Models (LLMs) to human instructions. Despite its critical role, current methods for generating instruction-tuning datasets exhibit significant bottlenecks, primarily in terms of high cost and limited diversity. However, as previously shown in the literature, the diversity of an instruction-tuning dataset is crucial to LLM's downstream performance. To address these challenges, we propose a Diffusion Language Model (DiffLM)-based technique to generate unlimited diverse instructions at a low cost. Specifically, we have enhanced the variability of instructions by strategically modifying the sampling process within the DiffLM. Our method presents the opportunity to augment any existing instruction-tuning dataset, thereby enriching its content and potential utility. Both automatic and human evaluation show that our generated instructions achieve high quality and better n-gram diversity than the original dataset. Instruction tuning of LLaMA on the augmented dataset delivers better instruction following capability and superior performance on a broad set of benchmarks, indicating the effectiveness of our instruction generation method.