A Teacher Is Worth A Million Instructions

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel training approach for smaller language models that leverages larger models as teachers and employs domain-specific alignment, significantly improving performance on benchmark tasks.

Contribution

The authors propose an improved training method using knowledge from larger models and a domain alignment phase, enhancing smaller models' capabilities beyond existing state-of-the-art.

Findings

Fine-tuned Mistral 7B surpasses state-of-the-art models on MT-Bench and AlpacaEval.

The method effectively transfers knowledge from larger models to smaller ones.

Domain-specific alignment boosts performance without sacrificing generalization.

Abstract

Large Language Models(LLMs) have shown exceptional abilities, yet training these models can be quite challenging. There is a strong dependence on the quality of data and finding the best instruction tuning set. Further, the inherent limitations in training methods create substantial difficulties to train relatively smaller models with 7B and 13B parameters. In our research, we suggest an improved training method for these models by utilising knowledge from larger models, such as a mixture of experts (8x7B) architectures. The scale of these larger models allows them to capture a wide range of variations from data alone, making them effective teachers for smaller models. Moreover, we implement a novel post-training domain alignment phase that employs domain-specific expert models to boost domain-specific knowledge during training while preserving the model's ability to generalise. Fine-tuning Mistral 7B and 2x7B with our method surpasses the performance of state-of-the-art language models with more than 7B and 13B parameters: achieving up to $7.9$ in MT-Bench and $93.04\%$ on AlpacaEval.