Daily Papers

The development of Large Language Models (LLMs) often confronts challenges stemming from the heavy reliance on human annotators in the reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) framework, or the frequent and costly external queries tied to the self-instruct paradigm. In this work, we pivot to Reinforcement Learning (RL) -- but with a twist. Diverging from the typical RLHF, which refines LLMs following instruction data training, we use RL to directly generate the foundational instruction dataset that alone suffices for fine-tuning. Our method, TeaMs-RL, uses a suite of textual operations and rules, prioritizing the diversification of training datasets. It facilitates the generation of high-quality data without excessive reliance on external advanced models, paving the way for a single fine-tuning step and negating the need for subsequent RLHF stages. Our findings highlight key advantages of our approach: reduced need for human involvement and fewer model queries (only 5.73% of the strong baseline's total), along with enhanced capabilities of LLMs in crafting and comprehending complex instructions compared to strong baselines, and substantially improved model privacy protection. Code is available at the link: https://github.com/SafeRL-Lab/TeaMs-RL

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) with extended context windows have significantly improved tasks such as information extraction, question answering, and complex planning scenarios. In order to achieve success in long context tasks, a large amount of work has been done to enhance the long context capabilities of the model through synthetic data. Existing methods typically utilize the Self-Instruct framework to generate instruction tuning data for better long context capability improvement. However, our preliminary experiments indicate that less than 35% of generated samples are multi-hop, and more than 40% exhibit poor quality, limiting comprehensive understanding and further research. To improve the quality of synthetic data, we propose the Multi-agent Interactive Multi-hop Generation (MIMG) framework, incorporating a Quality Verification Agent, a Single-hop Question Generation Agent, a Multiple Question Sampling Strategy, and a Multi-hop Question Merger Agent. This framework improves the data quality, with the proportion of high-quality, multi-hop, and diverse data exceeding 85%. Furthermore, we systematically investigate strategies for document selection, question merging, and validation techniques through extensive experiments across various models. Our findings show that our synthetic high-quality long-context instruction data significantly enhances model performance, even surpassing models trained on larger amounts of human-annotated data. Our code is available at: https://github.com/WowCZ/LongMIT.

Instruction tuning is essential for large language models (LLMs) to become interactive. While many instruction tuning datasets exist in English, there is a noticeable lack in other languages. Also, their effectiveness has not been well verified in non-English languages. We construct a Japanese instruction dataset by expanding and filtering existing datasets and apply the dataset to a Japanese pre-trained base model. We performed Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) tuning on both Japanese and English existing models using our instruction dataset. We evaluated these models from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives. As a result, the effectiveness of Japanese instruction datasets is confirmed. The results also indicate that even with relatively small LLMs, performances in downstream tasks would be improved through instruction tuning. Our instruction dataset, tuned models, and implementation are publicly available online.

Visual instruction datasets from various distributors are released at different times and often contain a significant number of semantically redundant text-image pairs, depending on their task compositions (i.e., skills) or reference sources. This redundancy greatly limits the efficient deployment of lifelong adaptable multimodal large language models, hindering their ability to refine existing skills and acquire new competencies over time. To address this, we reframe the problem of Lifelong Instruction Tuning (LiIT) via data selection, where the model automatically selects beneficial samples to learn from earlier and new datasets based on the current state of acquired knowledge in the model. Based on empirical analyses that show that selecting the best data subset using a static importance measure is often ineffective for multi-task datasets with evolving distributions, we propose Adapt-infty, a new multi-way and adaptive data selection approach that dynamically balances sample efficiency and effectiveness during LiIT. We construct pseudo-skill clusters by grouping gradient-based sample vectors. Next, we select the best-performing data selector for each skill cluster from a pool of selector experts, including our newly proposed scoring function, Image Grounding score. This data selector samples a subset of the most important samples from each skill cluster for training. To prevent the continuous increase in the size of the dataset pool during LiIT, which would result in excessive computation, we further introduce a cluster-wise permanent data pruning strategy to remove the most semantically redundant samples from each cluster, keeping computational requirements manageable. Training with samples selected by Adapt-infty alleviates catastrophic forgetting, especially for rare tasks, and promotes forward transfer across the continuum using only a fraction of the original datasets.

Recent breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs) have centered around a handful of data-rich languages. What does it take to broaden access to breakthroughs beyond first-class citizen languages? Our work introduces Aya, a massively multilingual generative language model that follows instructions in 101 languages of which over 50% are considered as lower-resourced. Aya outperforms mT0 and BLOOMZ on the majority of tasks while covering double the number of languages. We introduce extensive new evaluation suites that broaden the state-of-art for multilingual eval across 99 languages -- including discriminative and generative tasks, human evaluation, and simulated win rates that cover both held-out tasks and in-distribution performance. Furthermore, we conduct detailed investigations on the optimal finetuning mixture composition, data pruning, as well as the toxicity, bias, and safety of our models. We open-source our instruction datasets and our model at https://hf.co/CohereForAI/aya-101

Fine-tuning large pre-trained language models with Evol-Instruct has achieved encouraging results across a wide range of tasks. However, designing effective evolving methods for instruction evolution requires substantial human expertise. This paper proposes Auto Evol-Instruct, an end-to-end framework that evolves instruction datasets using large language models without any human effort. The framework automatically analyzes and summarizes suitable evolutionary strategies for the given instruction data and iteratively improves the evolving method based on issues exposed during the instruction evolution process. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that the best method optimized by Auto Evol-Instruct outperforms human-designed methods on various benchmarks, including MT-Bench, AlpacaEval, GSM8K, and HumanEval.

Instruction tuning improves the ability of large language models (LLMs) to follow diverse human instructions, but achieving strong performance on specific target tasks remains challenging. A critical bottleneck is selecting the most relevant data to maximize task-specific performance. Existing data selection approaches include unstable influence-based methods and more stable distribution alignment methods, the latter of which critically rely on the underlying sample representation. In practice, most distribution alignment methods, from shallow features (e.g., BM25) to neural embeddings (e.g., BGE, LLM2Vec), may fail to capture how the model internally processes samples. To bridge this gap, we adopt a model-centric strategy in which each sample is represented by its neuronal activation pattern in the model, directly reflecting internal computation. However, directly using raw neuron activations leads to spurious similarity between unrelated samples due to neuron polysemanticity, where a single neuron may respond to multiple, unrelated concepts. To address this, we employ sparse autoencoders to disentangle polysemantic activations into sparse, monosemantic representations, and introduce a dedicated similarity metric for this space to better identify task-relevant data. Comprehensive experiments across multiple instruction datasets, models, tasks, and selection ratios show that our approach consistently outperforms existing data selection baselines in both stability and task-specific performance.

Recently, large language models (LLMs) and multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated promising results on document visual question answering (VQA) task, particularly after training on document instruction datasets. An effective evaluation method for document instruction data is crucial in constructing instruction data with high efficacy, which, in turn, facilitates the training of LLMs and MLLMs for document VQA. However, most existing evaluation methods for instruction data are limited to the textual content of the instructions themselves, thereby hindering the effective assessment of document instruction datasets and constraining their construction. In this paper, we propose ProcTag, a data-oriented method that assesses the efficacy of document instruction data. ProcTag innovatively performs tagging on the execution process of instructions rather than the instruction text itself. By leveraging the diversity and complexity of these tags to assess the efficacy of the given dataset, ProcTag enables selective sampling or filtering of document instructions. Furthermore, DocLayPrompt, a novel semi-structured layout-aware document prompting strategy, is proposed for effectively representing documents. Experiments demonstrate that sampling existing open-sourced and generated document VQA/instruction datasets with ProcTag significantly outperforms current methods for evaluating instruction data. Impressively, with ProcTag-based sampling in the generated document datasets, only 30.5\% of the document instructions are required to achieve 100\% efficacy compared to the complete dataset. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/AlibabaResearch/AdvancedLiterateMachinery/tree/main/DocumentUnderstanding/ProcTag.

In recent years, instruction tuning has gained increasing attention and emerged as a crucial technique to enhance the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). To construct high-quality instruction datasets, many instruction processing approaches have been proposed, aiming to achieve a delicate balance between data quantity and data quality. Nevertheless, due to inconsistencies that persist among various instruction processing methods, there is no standard open-source instruction processing implementation framework available for the community, which hinders practitioners from further developing and advancing. To facilitate instruction processing research and development, we present EasyInstruct, an easy-to-use instruction processing framework for LLMs, which modularizes instruction generation, selection, and prompting, while also considering their combination and interaction. EasyInstruct is publicly released and actively maintained at https://github.com/zjunlp/EasyInstruct, along with a running demo App at https://huggingface.co/spaces/zjunlp/EasyInstruct for quick-start, calling for broader research centered on instruction data.

Instruction tuning has become a foundation for unlocking the capabilities of large-scale pretrained models and improving their performance on complex tasks. Thus, the construction of high-quality instruction datasets is crucial for enhancing model performance and generalizability. Although current instruction datasets have reached tens of millions of samples, models finetuned on them may still struggle with complex instruction following and tasks in rare domains. This is primarily due to limited expansion in both ``coverage'' (coverage of task types and knowledge areas) and ``depth'' (instruction complexity) of the instruction set. To address this issue, we propose a systematic instruction data construction framework, which integrates a hierarchical labeling system, an informative seed selection algorithm, an evolutionary data synthesis process, and a model deficiency diagnosis with targeted data generation. These components form an iterative closed-loop to continuously enhance the coverage and depth of instruction data. Based on this framework, we construct InfinityInstruct-Subject, a high-quality dataset containing ~1.5 million instructions. Experiments on multiple foundation models and benchmark tasks demonstrate its effectiveness in improving instruction-following capabilities. Further analyses suggest that InfinityInstruct-Subject shows enlarged coverage and depth compared to comparable synthesized instruction datasets. Our work lays a theoretical and practical foundation for the efficient, continuous evolution of instruction datasets, moving from data quantity expansion to qualitative improvement.

The gigapixel scale of whole slide images (WSIs) poses a challenge for histopathology multi-modal chatbots, requiring a global WSI analysis for diagnosis, compounding evidence from different WSI patches. Current visual instruction datasets, generated through large language models, focus on creating question/answer pairs for individual image patches, which may lack diagnostic capacity on their own in histopathology, further complicated by the absence of spatial grounding in histopathology image captions. To bridge this gap, we introduce Quilt-Instruct, a large-scale dataset of 107,131 histopathology-specific instruction question/answer pairs, that is collected by leveraging educational histopathology videos from YouTube, which provides spatial localization of captions by automatically extracting narrators' cursor movements. In addition, we provide contextual reasoning by extracting diagnosis and supporting facts from the entire video content to guide the extrapolative reasoning of GPT-4. Using Quilt-Instruct, we train Quilt-LLaVA, which can reason beyond the given single image patch, enabling diagnostic reasoning and the capability of spatial awareness. To evaluate Quilt-LLaVA, we propose a comprehensive evaluation dataset created from 985 images and 1283 human-generated question-answers. We also thoroughly evaluate Quilt-LLaVA using public histopathology datasets, where Quilt-LLaVA significantly outperforms SOTA by over 10% on relative GPT-4 score and 4% and 9% on open and closed set VQA. Our code, data, and model are publicly available at quilt-llava.github.io.

With the availability of various instruction datasets, a pivotal challenge is how to effectively select and integrate these instructions to fine-tune large language models (LLMs). Previous research mainly focuses on selecting individual high-quality instructions. However, these works overlooked the joint interactions and dependencies between different categories of instructions, leading to suboptimal selection strategies. Moreover, the nature of these interaction patterns remains largely unexplored, let alone optimize the instruction set with regard to them. To fill these gaps, in this paper, we: (1) systemically investigate interaction and dependency patterns between different categories of instructions, (2) manage to optimize the instruction set concerning the interaction patterns using a linear programming-based method, and optimize the learning schema of SFT using an instruction dependency taxonomy guided curriculum learning. Experimental results across different LLMs demonstrate improved performance over strong baselines on widely adopted benchmarks.

Instruction tuning is crucial for enabling Language Learning Models (LLMs) in responding to human instructions. The quality of instruction pairs used for tuning greatly affects the performance of LLMs. However, the manual creation of high-quality instruction datasets is costly, leading to the adoption of automatic generation of instruction pairs by LLMs as a popular alternative in the training of open-source LLMs. To ensure the high quality of LLM-generated instruction datasets, several approaches have been proposed. Nevertheless, existing methods either compromise dataset integrity by filtering a large proportion of samples, or are unsuitable for industrial applications. In this paper, instead of discarding low-quality samples, we propose CoachLM, a novel approach to enhance the quality of instruction datasets through automatic revisions on samples in the dataset. CoachLM is trained from the samples revised by human experts and significantly increases the proportion of high-quality samples in the dataset from 17.7% to 78.9%. The effectiveness of CoachLM is further assessed on various real-world instruction test sets. The results show that CoachLM improves the instruction-following capabilities of the instruction-tuned LLM by an average of 29.9%, which even surpasses larger LLMs with nearly twice the number of parameters. Furthermore, CoachLM is successfully deployed in a data management system for LLMs at Huawei, resulting in an efficiency improvement of up to 20% in the cleaning of 40k real-world instruction pairs. We release the training data and code of CoachLM (https://github.com/lunyiliu/CoachLM).

Instruction tuning has been widely adopted to ensure large language models (LLMs) follow user instructions effectively. The resulting instruction-following capabilities of LLMs heavily rely on the instruction datasets used for tuning. Recently, synthetic instruction datasets have emerged as an economically viable solution to provide LLMs diverse and high-quality instructions. However, existing approaches typically assume that larger or stronger models are stronger teachers for instruction tuning, and hence simply adopt these models as response generators to the synthetic instructions. In this paper, we challenge this commonly-adopted assumption. Our extensive experiments across five base models and twenty response generators reveal that larger and stronger models are not necessarily stronger teachers of smaller models. We refer to this phenomenon as the Larger Models' Paradox. We observe that existing metrics cannot precisely predict the effectiveness of response generators since they ignore the compatibility between teachers and base models being fine-tuned. We thus develop a novel metric, named as Compatibility-Adjusted Reward (CAR) to measure the effectiveness of response generators. Our experiments across five base models demonstrate that CAR outperforms almost all baselines.

Instruction tuning plays a critical role in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preference. Despite the vast amount of open instruction datasets, naively training a LLM on all existing instructions may not be optimal and practical. To pinpoint the most beneficial datapoints, data assessment and selection methods have been proposed in the fields of natural language processing (NLP) and deep learning. However, under the context of instruction tuning, there still exists a gap in knowledge on what kind of data evaluation metrics can be employed and how they can be integrated into the selection mechanism. To bridge this gap, we present a comprehensive review on existing literature of data assessment and selection especially for instruction tuning of LLMs. We systematically categorize all applicable methods into quality-based, diversity-based, and importance-based ones where a unified, fine-grained taxonomy is structured. For each category, representative methods are elaborated to describe the landscape of relevant research. In addition, comparison between latest methods is conducted on their officially reported results to provide in-depth discussions on their limitations. Finally, we summarize the open challenges and propose the promosing avenues for future studies. All related contents are available at https://github.com/yuleiqin/fantastic-data-engineering.

Instruction tuning has emerged as a prominent methodology for teaching Large Language Models (LLMs) to follow instructions. However, current instruction datasets predominantly cater to English or are derived from English-dominated LLMs, resulting in inherent biases toward Western culture. This bias significantly impacts the linguistic structures of non-English languages such as Arabic, which has a distinct grammar reflective of the diverse cultures across the Arab region. This paper addresses this limitation by introducing CIDAR: https://hf.co/datasets/arbml/CIDAR, the first open Arabic instruction-tuning dataset culturally-aligned by human reviewers. CIDAR contains 10,000 instruction and output pairs that represent the Arab region. We discuss the cultural relevance of CIDAR via the analysis and comparison to other models fine-tuned on other datasets. Our experiments show that CIDAR can help enrich research efforts in aligning LLMs with the Arabic culture. All the code is available at https://github.com/ARBML/CIDAR.

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) with a collection of large and diverse instructions has improved the model's generalization to different tasks, even for unseen tasks. However, most existing instruction datasets include only single instructions, and they struggle to follow complex instructions composed of multiple subtasks (Wang et al., 2023a). In this work, we propose a novel concept of compositional instructions called chain-of-instructions (CoI), where the output of one instruction becomes an input for the next like a chain. Unlike the conventional practice of solving single instruction tasks, our proposed method encourages a model to solve each subtask step by step until the final answer is reached. CoI-tuning (i.e., fine-tuning with CoI instructions) improves the model's ability to handle instructions composed of multiple subtasks. CoI-tuned models also outperformed baseline models on multilingual summarization, demonstrating the generalizability of CoI models on unseen composite downstream tasks.

Instruction tuning, a specialized technique to enhance large language model (LLM) performance via instruction datasets, relies heavily on the quality of employed data. Existing quality improvement methods alter instruction data through dataset expansion or curation. However, the expansion method risks data redundancy, potentially compromising LLM performance, while the curation approach confines the LLM's potential to the original dataset. Our aim is to surpass the original data quality without encountering these shortcomings. To achieve this, we propose LIFT (LLM Instruction Fusion Transfer), a novel and versatile paradigm designed to elevate the instruction quality to new heights. LIFT strategically broadens data distribution to encompass more high-quality subspaces and eliminates redundancy, concentrating on high-quality segments across overall data subspaces. Experimental results demonstrate that, even with a limited quantity of high-quality instruction data selected by our paradigm, LLMs not only consistently uphold robust performance across various tasks but also surpass some state-of-the-art results, highlighting the significant improvement in instruction quality achieved by our paradigm.

Accurate coding of tumor diagnoses with ICD-10-GM and ICD-O-3 is essential for structured cancer documentation in Germany. Smaller open-weight LLMs are appealing for privacy-preserving automation but often struggle with coding accuracy in German-language contexts. This study investigates whether instruction-based fine-tuning on public datasets improves the coding accuracy of open-weight LLMs for German tumor diagnosis texts. The evaluation uses coded diagnoses from the local tumor documentation system as test data. In a systematic data quality assessment, the upper limit for ICD-10 coding performance was estimated at 60-79% for exact and 81-94% for partial (three-character codes only) derivation. As training data, over 500,000 question-answer pairs were created based on the ICD-10-GM, ICD-O-3, and OPS catalogues. Eight open-weight models from the Qwen, Llama, and Mistral families (7-70 B parameters) were fine-tuned. ICD-10-GM accuracy rose from 1.4-24% to 41-58%, and partial accuracy from 31-74% to 73-83%. The accuracy of ICD-O-3 topography coding also improved but started and remained considerably lower with an exact accuracy of 22-40% and a partial accuracy of 56-67% after fine-tuning. Malformed code outputs dropped to 0% for all models. Tumor-diagnosis recognition reached 99%. Accuracy correlated positively with model size, but gaps between small and large models narrowed after fine-tuning. The reasoning mode in Qwen3 generally yielded a lower performance than fine-tuning and was over 100 times slower. Our findings highlight the potential of leveraging public catalogues to build instruction datasets that improve LLMs in medical documentation tasks. The complete training dataset and the best-performing checkpoints of the fine-tuned models are available from https://huggingface.co/datasets/stefan-m-lenz/ICDOPS-QA-2024.

Recent advances in Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), such as LLaVA-series models, are driven by massive machine-generated instruction-following data tuning. Such automatic instruction collection pipelines, however, inadvertently introduce significant variability in data quality. This paper introduces a novel instruction curation algorithm, derived from two unique perspectives, human and LLM preference alignment, to compress this vast corpus of machine-generated multimodal instructions to a compact and high-quality form: (i) For human preference alignment, we have collected a machine-generated multimodal instruction dataset and established a comprehensive set of both subjective and objective criteria to guide the data quality assessment critically from human experts. By doing so, a reward model was trained on the annotated dataset to internalize the nuanced human understanding of instruction alignment. (ii) For LLM preference alignment, given the instruction selected by the reward model, we propose leveraging the inner LLM used in MLLM to align the writing style of visual instructions with that of the inner LLM itself, resulting in LLM-aligned instruction improvement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that we can maintain or even improve model performance by compressing synthetic multimodal instructions by up to 90%. Impressively, by aggressively reducing the total training sample size from 158k to 14k (9times smaller), our model consistently outperforms its full-size dataset counterpart across various MLLM benchmarks. Our project is available at https://github.com/DCDmllm/Align2LLaVA.

Instruction fine-tuning stands as a crucial advancement in leveraging large language models (LLMs) for enhanced task performance. However, the annotation of instruction datasets has traditionally been expensive and laborious, often relying on manual annotations or costly API calls of proprietary LLMs. To address these challenges, we introduce FANNO, a fully autonomous, open-sourced framework that revolutionizes the annotation process without the need for pre-existing annotated data. Utilizing a Mistral-7b-instruct model, FANNO efficiently produces diverse and high-quality datasets through a structured process involving document pre-screening, instruction generation, and response generation. Experiments on Open LLM Leaderboard and AlpacaEval benchmark show that the FANNO can generate high-quality data with diversity and complexity for free, comparable to human-annotated or cleaned datasets like Alpaca-GPT4-Cleaned.

Comparing two images in terms of Commonalities and Differences (CaD) is a fundamental human capability that forms the basis of advanced visual reasoning and interpretation. It is essential for the generation of detailed and contextually relevant descriptions, performing comparative analysis, novelty detection, and making informed decisions based on visual data. However, surprisingly, little attention has been given to these fundamental concepts in the best current mimic of human visual intelligence - Large Multimodal Models (LMMs). We develop and contribute a new two-phase approach CaD-VI for collecting synthetic visual instructions, together with an instruction-following dataset CaD-Inst containing 349K image pairs with CaD instructions collected using CaD-VI. Our approach significantly improves the CaD spotting capabilities in LMMs, advancing the SOTA on a diverse set of related tasks by up to 17.5%. It is also complementary to existing difference-only instruction datasets, allowing automatic targeted refinement of those resources increasing their effectiveness for CaD tuning by up to 10%. Additionally, we propose an evaluation benchmark with 7.5K open-ended QAs to assess the CaD understanding abilities of LMMs.

We show that language model finetuning can be improved, sometimes dramatically, with a simple augmentation. NEFTune adds noise to the embedding vectors during training. Standard finetuning of LLaMA-2-7B using Alpaca achieves 29.79% on AlpacaEval, which rises to 64.69% using noisy embeddings. NEFTune also improves over strong baselines on modern instruction datasets. Models trained with Evol-Instruct see a 10% improvement, with ShareGPT an 8% improvement, and with OpenPlatypus an 8% improvement. Even powerful models further refined with RLHF such as LLaMA-2-Chat benefit from additional training with NEFTune.

The recent advancement of large language models (LLMs) has been achieved through a combo of instruction tuning and human alignment. However, building manually crafted instruction datasets and performing human alignment become the bottleneck for scaling the development of LLMs. In this paper, we exploit the idea of leveraging AI models in lieu of humans as the teacher to train student LLMs. Our method is inspired by how human students refine their writing skills by following the rubrics and learning from the revisions offered by their tutors. Specifically, we employ a teacher LLM to create a curriculum for instruction tuning of the student LLM, namely Curriculum Instruction TunING (CITING). It encompasses two main steps: (1) the teacher LLM crafts the rubrics for evaluating the answers corresponding to various types of questions, and (2) the student LLM learns to follow the rubrics and perform self-correction from the revision made by the teacher. We further iteratively carry out it to embody the procedure of CITING. We compare CITING to a series of state-of-the-art baselines on four datasets. Our method demonstrates strong improvement in terms of articulate, in-depth, and comprehensive by GPT-4 evaluation. Specifically, it achieves an average winning rate of 79.4% over SFT, 73.4% over RLHF, 78.1% over RRHF, and 76.3% over RAFT, respectively.

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) tuned on machine-generated instruction-following data have demonstrated remarkable performance in various multi-modal understanding and generation tasks. However, the hallucinations inherent in machine-generated data, which could lead to hallucinatory outputs in MLLMs, remain under-explored. This work aims to investigate various hallucinations (i.e., object, relation, attribute hallucinations) and mitigate those hallucinatory toxicities in large-scale machine-generated visual instruction datasets. Drawing on the human ability to identify factual errors, we present a novel hallucination detection and elimination framework, HalluciDoctor, based on the cross-checking paradigm. We use our framework to identify and eliminate hallucinations in the training data automatically. Interestingly, HalluciDoctor also indicates that spurious correlations arising from long-tail object co-occurrences contribute to hallucinations. Based on that, we execute counterfactual visual instruction expansion to balance data distribution, thereby enhancing MLLMs' resistance to hallucinations. Comprehensive experiments on hallucination evaluation benchmarks show that our method successfully mitigates 44.6% hallucinations relatively and maintains competitive performance compared to LLaVA.The source code will be released at https://github.com/Yuqifan1117/HalluciDoctor.

Large Language Models are traditionally finetuned on large instruction datasets. However recent studies suggest that small, high-quality datasets can suffice for general purpose instruction following. This lack of consensus surrounding finetuning best practices is in part due to rapidly diverging approaches to LLM evaluation. In this study, we ask whether a small amount of diverse finetuning samples can improve performance on both traditional perplexity-based NLP benchmarks, and on open-ended, model-based evaluation. We finetune open-source MPT-7B and MPT-30B models on instruction finetuning datasets of various sizes ranging from 1k to 60k samples. We find that subsets of 1k-6k instruction finetuning samples are sufficient to achieve good performance on both (1) traditional NLP benchmarks and (2) model-based evaluation. Finally, we show that mixing textbook-style and open-ended QA finetuning datasets optimizes performance on both evaluation paradigms.

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate strong performance in real-world applications, yet existing open-source instruction datasets often concentrate on narrow domains, such as mathematics or coding, limiting generalization and widening the gap with proprietary models. To bridge this gap, we introduce Infinity-Instruct, a high-quality instruction dataset designed to enhance both foundational and chat capabilities of LLMs through a two-phase pipeline. In Phase 1, we curate 7.4M high-quality foundational instructions (InfInstruct-F-7.4M) from over 100M samples using hybrid data selection techniques. In Phase 2, we synthesize 1.5M high-quality chat instructions (InfInstruct-G-1.5M) through a two-stage process involving instruction selection, evolution, and diagnostic filtering. We empirically evaluate Infinity-Instruct by fine-tuning several open-source models, including Mistral, LLaMA, Qwen, and Yi, and observe substantial performance gains across both foundational and instruction following benchmarks, consistently surpassing official instruction-tuned counterparts. Notably, InfInstruct-LLaMA3.1-70B outperforms GPT-4-0314 by 8.6\% on instruction following tasks while achieving comparable foundational performance. These results underscore the synergy between foundational and chat training and offer new insights into holistic LLM development. Our datasethttps://huggingface.co/datasets/BAAI/Infinity-Instruct and codeshttps://gitee.com/li-touch/infinity-instruct have been publicly released.

In this paper, we introduce Kun, a novel approach for creating high-quality instruction-tuning datasets for large language models (LLMs) without relying on manual annotations. Adapting a self-training algorithm based on instruction back-translation and answer polishment, Kun leverages unlabelled data from diverse sources such as Wudao, Wanjuan, and SkyPile to generate a substantial dataset of over a million Chinese instructional data points. This approach significantly deviates from traditional methods by using a self-curation process to refine and select the most effective instruction-output pairs. Our experiments with the 6B-parameter Yi model across various benchmarks demonstrate Kun's robustness and scalability. Our method's core contributions lie in its algorithmic advancement, which enhances data retention and clarity, and its innovative data generation approach that substantially reduces the reliance on costly and time-consuming manual annotations. This methodology presents a scalable and efficient solution for improving the instruction-following capabilities of LLMs, with significant implications for their application across diverse fields. The code and dataset can be found at https://github.com/Zheng0428/COIG-Kun

Large language models (LLMs) have received a lot of attention in natural language processing (NLP) research because of their exceptional performance in understanding and generating human languages. However, low-resource languages are left behind due to the unavailability of resources. In this work, we focus on enhancing the LLaMA-2-Amharic model by integrating task-specific and generative datasets to improve language model performance for Amharic. We compile an Amharic instruction fine-tuning dataset and fine-tuned LLaMA-2-Amharic model. The fine-tuned model shows promising results in different NLP tasks. We open-source our dataset creation pipeline, instruction datasets, trained models, and evaluation outputs to promote language-specific studies on these models.

Recently, significant public efforts have been directed towards developing low-cost models with capabilities akin to ChatGPT, thereby fostering the growth of open-source conversational models. However, there remains a scarcity of comprehensive and in-depth evaluations of these models' performance. In this study, we examine the influence of training data factors, including quantity, quality, and linguistic distribution, on model performance. Our analysis is grounded in several publicly accessible, high-quality instruction datasets, as well as our own Chinese multi-turn conversations. We assess various models using a evaluation set of 1,000 samples, encompassing nine real-world scenarios. Our goal is to supplement manual evaluations with quantitative analyses, offering valuable insights for the continued advancement of open-source chat models. Furthermore, to enhance the performance and training and inference efficiency of models in the Chinese domain, we extend the vocabulary of LLaMA - the model with the closest open-source performance to proprietary language models like GPT-3 - and conduct secondary pre-training on 3.4B Chinese words. We make our model, data, as well as code publicly available.

With the rapid development of large language models in recent years, there has been an increasing demand for domain-specific Agents that can cater to the unique needs of enterprises and organizations. Unlike general models, which strive for broad coverage, these specialized Agents rely on focused datasets tailored to their intended applications. This research proposes a pipeline that leverages the power of LLMs and the Retrieval-Augmented Generation related framework to construct high-quality instruction datasets for fine-tuning on specific domains using custom document collections. By ingesting domain-specific documents, the pipeline generates relevant and contextually appropriate instructions, thus effectively creating a comprehensive dataset for fine-tuning LLMs on the target domain. This approach overcomes the limitations of traditional dataset creation methods, which often rely on manual curation or web-scraping techniques that may introduce noise and irrelevant data. Notably, our pipeline offers a dynamic solution that can quickly adapt to updates or modifications in the domain-specific document collection, eliminating the need for complete retraining. Additionally, it addresses the challenge of data scarcity by enabling the generation of instruction datasets from a limited set of initial documents, rendering it suitable for unpopular or specialized domains where comprehensive datasets are scarce. As a case study, we apply this approach to the domain of psychiatry, a field requiring specialized knowledge and sensitive handling of patient information. The resulting fine-tuned LLM demonstrates showcases the viability of the proposed approach and underscores its potential for widespread adoption across various industries and domains where tailored, accurate, and contextually relevant language models are indispensable.

Large language models (LLMs) have greatly impacted the natural language processing (NLP) field, particularly for the English language. These models have demonstrated capabilities in understanding and generating human-like text. The success of language models largely depends on the availability of high-quality instruction datasets, which consist of detailed task descriptions and corresponding responses that are essential for training the models to address a variety of prompts accurately. However, the availability and quality of these resources vary by language. While models perform well in English, they often need help with languages like Arabic, due to the lack of datasets for fine-tuning Arabic-specific tasks. To address this issue, we introduce InstAr-500k, a new Arabic instruction dataset created by generating and collecting content that covers several domains and instruction types. We assess this dataset by fine-tuning an open-source Gemma-7B model on several downstream tasks to improve its functionality. Based on multiple evaluations, our fine-tuned model achieves excellent performance on several Arabic NLP benchmarks. These outcomes emphasize the effectiveness of our dataset in elevating the capabilities of language models for Arabic. Our instruction dataset bridges the performance gap between English and Arabic language models by providing resources that amplify Arabic NLP development. Building on this foundation, we developed a model, GemmAr-7B-V1, specifically tuned to excel at a wide range of Arabic NLP tasks.

In production, multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) are expected to support multi-turn queries of interchanging image and text modalities. However, the current MLLMs trained with visual-question-answering (VQA) datasets could suffer from degradation, as VQA datasets lack the diversity and complexity of the original text instruction datasets which the underlying language model had been trained with. To address this challenging degradation, we first collect a lightweight (6k entries) VQA preference dataset where answers were annotated by Gemini for 5 quality metrics in a granular fashion, and investigate standard Supervised Fine-tuning, rejection sampling, Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), and SteerLM. Our findings indicate that the with DPO we are able to surpass instruction-following capabilities of the language model, achieving a 6.73 score on MT-Bench, compared to Vicuna's 6.57 and LLaVA's 5.99 despite small data scale. This enhancement in textual instruction proficiency correlates with boosted visual instruction performance (+4.9\% on MM-Vet, +6\% on LLaVA-Bench), with minimal alignment tax on visual knowledge benchmarks compared to previous RLHF approach. In conclusion, we propose a distillation-based multi-modal alignment model with fine-grained annotations on a small dataset that reconciles the textual and visual performance of MLLMs, restoring and boosting language capability after visual instruction tuning.

Instruction tuning is a vital step of training large language models (LLM), so how to enhance the effect of instruction tuning has received increased attention. Existing works indicate that the quality of the dataset is more crucial than the quantity during instruction tuning of LLM. Therefore, recently a lot of studies focus on exploring the methods of selecting high-quality subset from instruction datasets, aiming to reduce training costs and enhance the instruction-following capabilities of LLMs. This paper presents a comprehensive survey on data selection for LLM instruction tuning. Firstly, we introduce the wildly used instruction datasets. Then, we propose a new taxonomy of the data selection methods and provide a detailed introduction of recent advances,and the evaluation strategies and results of data selection methods are also elaborated in detail. Finally, we emphasize the open challenges and present new frontiers of this task.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) exhibit remarkable multi-tasking ability by learning mixed instruction datasets. However, novel tasks would be encountered sequentially in dynamic world, which urges for equipping LMMs with multimodal continual instruction learning (MCIT) ability especially for diverse and challenging generative tasks. Existing MCIT methods do not fully exploit the unique attribute of LMMs and often gain performance at the expense of efficiency. In this paper, we propose a novel prompt learning framework for MCIT to effectively alleviate forgetting of previous knowledge while managing computational complexity with natural image-text supervision. Concretely, we learn prompts for each task and exploit efficient prompt fusion for knowledge transfer and prompt selection for complexity management with dual-modality guidance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves substantial +14.26% performance gain on MCIT benchmarks with remarkable times 1.42 inference speed free from growing computation. Code is available at https://github.com/AuroraZengfh/ModalPrompt.

There has been a surge in the development of various Large Language Models (LLMs). However, text generation for languages other than English often faces significant challenges, including poor generation quality and the reduced computational performance due to the disproportionate representation of tokens in model's vocabulary. In this work, we address these issues and introduce Vikhr, a new state-of-the-art open-source instruction-tuned LLM designed specifically for the Russian language. Unlike previous efforts for Russian that utilize computationally inexpensive LoRA adapters on top of English-oriented models, Vikhr features an adapted tokenizer vocabulary and undergoes the continued pre-training and instruction tuning of all weights. This approach not only enhances the model's performance but also significantly improves its computational and contextual efficiency. The remarkable performance of Vikhr across various Russian-language benchmarks can also be attributed to our efforts in expanding instruction datasets and corpora for continued pre-training. Vikhr not only sets the new state of the art among open-source LLMs for Russian, but even outperforms some proprietary closed-source models on certain benchmarks. The model weights, instruction sets, and code are publicly available

We propose a new method, instruction back-and-forth translation, to construct high-quality synthetic data grounded in world knowledge for aligning large language models (LLMs). Given documents from a web corpus, we generate and curate synthetic instructions using the backtranslation approach proposed by Li et al.(2023a), and rewrite the responses to improve their quality further based on the initial documents. Fine-tuning with the resulting (backtranslated instruction, rewritten response) pairs yields higher win rates on AlpacaEval than using other common instruction datasets such as Humpback, ShareGPT, Open Orca, Alpaca-GPT4 and Self-instruct. We also demonstrate that rewriting the responses with an LLM outperforms direct distillation, and the two generated text distributions exhibit significant distinction in embedding space. Further analysis shows that our backtranslated instructions are of higher quality than other sources of synthetic instructions, while our responses are more diverse and complex than those obtained from distillation. Overall we find that instruction back-and-forth translation combines the best of both worlds -- making use of the information diversity and quantity found on the web, while ensuring the quality of the responses which is necessary for effective alignment.

A practical approach to activate long chain-of-thoughts reasoning ability in pre-trained large language models is to perform supervised fine-tuning on instruction datasets synthesized by strong Large Reasoning Models such as DeepSeek-R1, offering a cost-effective alternative to reinforcement learning. However, large-scale instruction sets with more than 100k samples incur significant training overhead, while effective strategies for automatic long-CoT instruction selection still remain unexplored. In this work, we propose Select2Reason, a novel and efficient instruction-tuning data selection framework for long-CoT reasoning. From the perspective of emergence of rethinking behaviors like self-correction and backtracking, we investigate common metrics that may determine the quality of long-CoT reasoning instructions. Select2Reason leverages a quantifier to estimate difficulty of question and jointly incorporates a reasoning trace length-based heuristic through a weighted scheme for ranking to prioritize high-utility examples. Empirical results on OpenR1-Math-220k demonstrate that fine-tuning LLM on only 10% of the data selected by Select2Reason achieves performance competitive with or superior to full-data tuning and open-source baseline OpenR1-Qwen-7B across three competition-level and six comprehensive mathematical benchmarks. Further experiments highlight the scalability in varying data size, efficiency during inference, and its adaptability to other instruction pools with minimal cost.

This paper describes the instruction dataset used to fine-tune a set of transformer-based large language models (LLMs) developed in the PLLuM (Polish Large Language Model) project. We present a functional typology of the organic, converted, and synthetic instructions used in PLLuM and share some observations about the implications of using human-authored versus synthetic instruction datasets in the linguistic adaptation of base LLMs. Additionally, we release the first representative subset of the PLLuM instruction corpus (PLLuMIC), which we believe to be useful in guiding and planning the development of similar datasets for other LLMs.

Instruction tuning is widely used to improve a pre-trained Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) by training it on curated task-specific datasets, enabling better comprehension of human instructions. However, it is infeasible to collect all possible instruction datasets simultaneously in real-world scenarios. Thus, enabling MLLM with continual instruction tuning is essential for maintaining their adaptability. However, existing methods often trade off memory efficiency for performance gains, significantly compromising overall efficiency. In this paper, we propose a task-specific expansion and task-general fusion framework based on the variations in Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA) similarity across different model layers when trained on diverse datasets. Furthermore, we analyze the information leakage present in the existing benchmark and propose a new and more challenging benchmark to rationally evaluate the performance of different methods. Comprehensive experiments showcase a significant performance improvement of our method compared to existing state-of-the-art methods. Our code will be public available.

Instruction tuning has achieved unprecedented success in NLP, turning large language models into versatile chatbots. However, the increasing variety and volume of instruction datasets demand significant computational resources. To address this, it is essential to extract a small and highly informative subset (i.e., Coreset) that achieves comparable performance to the full dataset. Achieving this goal poses non-trivial challenges: 1) data selection requires accurate data representations that reflect the training samples' quality, 2) considering the diverse nature of instruction datasets, and 3) ensuring the efficiency of the coreset selection algorithm for large models. To address these challenges, we propose Task-Agnostic Gradient Clustered COreset Selection (TAGCOS). Specifically, we leverage sample gradients as the data representations, perform clustering to group similar data, and apply an efficient greedy algorithm for coreset selection. Experimental results show that our algorithm, selecting only 5% of the data, surpasses other unsupervised methods and achieves performance close to that of the full dataset.

This paper proposes LayoutLLM, a more flexible document analysis method for understanding imaged documents. Visually Rich Document Understanding tasks, such as document image classification and information extraction, have gained significant attention due to their importance. Existing methods have been developed to enhance document comprehension by incorporating pre-training awareness of images, text, and layout structure. However, these methods require fine-tuning for each task and dataset, and the models are expensive to train and operate. To overcome this limitation, we propose a new LayoutLLM that integrates these with large-scale language models (LLMs). By leveraging the strengths of existing research in document image understanding and LLMs' superior language understanding capabilities, the proposed model, fine-tuned with multimodal instruction datasets, performs an understanding of document images in a single model. Our experiments demonstrate improvement over the baseline model in various document analysis tasks.

Instruction tuning has become a key technique for enhancing the performance of large language models, enabling them to better follow human prompts. However, low-resource languages such as Luxembourgish face severe limitations due to the lack of high-quality instruction datasets. Traditional reliance on machine translation often introduces semantic misalignment and cultural inaccuracies. In this work, we address these challenges by creating a cross-lingual instruction tuning dataset for Luxembourgish, without resorting to machine-generated translations into it. Instead, by leveraging aligned data from English, French, and German, we build a high-quality dataset that preserves linguistic and cultural nuances. We provide evidence that cross-lingual instruction tuning not only improves representational alignment across languages but also the model's generative capabilities in Luxembourgish. This highlights how cross-lingual data curation can avoid the common pitfalls of machine-translated data and directly benefit low-resource language development.

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is essential for training large language models (LLMs), significantly enhancing critical capabilities such as instruction following and in-context learning. Nevertheless, creating suitable training datasets tailored for specific domains remains challenging due to unique domain constraints and data scarcity. In this paper, we propose SearchInstruct, an innovative method explicitly designed to construct high quality instruction datasets for SFT. Our approach begins with a limited set of domain specific, human generated questions, which are systematically expanded using a large language model. Subsequently, domain relevant resources are dynamically retrieved to generate accurate and contextually appropriate answers for each augmented question. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that SearchInstruct enhances both the diversity and quality of SFT datasets, leading to measurable improvements in LLM performance within specialized domains. Additionally, we show that beyond dataset generation, the proposed method can also effectively facilitate tasks such as model editing, enabling efficient updates to existing models. To facilitate reproducibility and community adoption, we provide full implementation details, the complete set of generated instruction response pairs, and the source code in a publicly accessible Git repository: [https://github.com/mostafaamiri/SearchInstruct](https://github.com/mostafaamiri/SearchInstruct)

In this work we explore recent advances in instruction-tuning language models on a range of open instruction-following datasets. Despite recent claims that open models can be on par with state-of-the-art proprietary models, these claims are often accompanied by limited evaluation, making it difficult to compare models across the board and determine the utility of various resources. We provide a large set of instruction-tuned models from 6.7B to 65B parameters in size, trained on 12 instruction datasets ranging from manually curated (e.g., OpenAssistant) to synthetic and distilled (e.g., Alpaca) and systematically evaluate them on their factual knowledge, reasoning, multilinguality, coding, and open-ended instruction following abilities through a collection of automatic, model-based, and human-based metrics. We further introduce T\"ulu, our best performing instruction-tuned model suite finetuned on a combination of high-quality open resources. Our experiments show that different instruction-tuning datasets can uncover or enhance specific skills, while no single dataset (or combination) provides the best performance across all evaluations. Interestingly, we find that model and human preference-based evaluations fail to reflect differences in model capabilities exposed by benchmark-based evaluations, suggesting the need for the type of systemic evaluation performed in this work. Our evaluations show that the best model in any given evaluation reaches on average 83% of ChatGPT performance, and 68% of GPT-4 performance, suggesting that further investment in building better base models and instruction-tuning data is required to close the gap. We release our instruction-tuned models, including a fully finetuned 65B T\"ulu, along with our code, data, and evaluation framework at https://github.com/allenai/open-instruct to facilitate future research.

Instruction tuning is an important step in making language models useful for direct user interaction. However, many legal tasks remain out of reach for most open LLMs and there do not yet exist any large scale instruction datasets for the domain. This critically limits research in this application area. In this work, we curate LawInstruct, a large legal instruction dataset, covering 17 jurisdictions, 24 languages and a total of 12M examples. We present evidence that domain-specific pretraining and instruction tuning improve performance on LegalBench, including improving Flan-T5 XL by 8 points or 16\% over the baseline. However, the effect does not generalize across all tasks, training regimes, model sizes, and other factors. LawInstruct is a resource for accelerating the development of models with stronger information processing and decision making capabilities in the legal domain.

Visual instruction tuning is the key to building multimodal large language models (MLLMs), which greatly improves the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in vision scenario. However, existing MLLMs mostly rely on a mixture of multiple highly diverse visual instruction datasets for training (even more than a million instructions), which may introduce data redundancy. To investigate this issue, we conduct a series of empirical studies, which reveal a significant redundancy within the visual instruction datasets, and show that greatly reducing the amount of several instruction dataset even do not affect the performance. Based on the findings, we propose a new data selection approach TIVE, to eliminate redundancy within visual instruction data. TIVE first estimates the task-level and instance-level value of the visual instructions based on computed gradients. Then, according to the estimated values, TIVE determines the task proportion within the visual instructions, and selects representative instances to compose a smaller visual instruction subset for training. Experiments on LLaVA-1.5 show that our approach using only about 7.5% data can achieve comparable performance as the full-data fine-tuned model across seven benchmarks, even surpassing it on four of the benchmarks. Our code and data will be publicly released.

The long-context capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have been a hot topic in recent years. To evaluate the performance of LLMs in different scenarios, various assessment benchmarks have emerged. However, as most of these benchmarks focus on identifying key information to answer questions, which mainly requires the retrieval ability of LLMs, these benchmarks can partially represent the reasoning performance of LLMs from large amounts of information. Meanwhile, although LLMs often claim to have context windows of 32k, 128k, 200k, or even longer, these benchmarks fail to reveal the actual supported length of these LLMs. To address these issues, we propose the LongIns benchmark dataset, a challenging long-context instruction-based exam for LLMs, which is built based on the existing instruction datasets. Specifically, in our LongIns, we introduce three evaluation settings: Global Instruction & Single Task (GIST), Local Instruction & Single Task (LIST), and Local Instruction & Multiple Tasks (LIMT). Based on LongIns, we perform comprehensive evaluations on existing LLMs and have the following important findings: (1). The top-performing GPT-4 with 128k context length performs poorly on the evaluation context window of 16k in our LongIns. (2). For the multi-hop reasoning ability of many existing LLMs, significant efforts are still needed under short context windows (less than 4k).

Recent advancements in Large Vision-Language Models are accelerating the development of Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents that utilize human-like vision perception capabilities to enhance productivity on digital devices. Compared to approaches predicated on GUI metadata, which are platform-dependent and vulnerable to implementation variations, vision-based approaches offer broader applicability. In this vision-based paradigm, the GUI instruction grounding, which maps user instruction to the location of corresponding element on the given screenshot, remains a critical challenge, particularly due to limited public training dataset and resource-intensive manual instruction data annotation. In this paper, we delve into unexplored challenges in this task including element-to-screen ratio, unbalanced element type, and implicit instruction. To address these challenges, we introduce a large-scale data synthesis pipeline UI-E2I-Synth for generating varying complex instruction datasets using GPT-4o instead of human annotators. Furthermore, we propose a new GUI instruction grounding benchmark UI-I2E-Bench, which is designed to address the limitations of existing benchmarks by incorporating diverse annotation aspects. Our model, trained on the synthesized data, achieves superior performance in GUI instruction grounding, demonstrating the advancements of proposed data synthesis pipeline. The proposed benchmark, accompanied by extensive analyses, provides practical insights for future research in GUI grounding. We will release corresponding artifacts at https://colmon46.github.io/i2e-bench-leaderboard/ .

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various tasks but still face challenges such as hallucinations. One potential reason for hallucinations is the lack of relevant knowledge or context. Thus, a promising solution to mitigate this issue involves instructing LLMs to respond with "I do not know" when a question falls outside their knowledge domain or the provided context. However, in this work, we observed that LLMs struggle to admit their lack of knowledge, primarily due to existing instruction datasets designed to encourage specific answers. To improve large language models' capability to recognize the boundaries of their knowledge, we propose a novel approach called uncertainty-sensitive tuning. This method involves two-stage training designed for uncertainty recognition and prompt-sensitive activation. In the first stage, we guide the LLM to reject unknown questions. In the second stage, we recover the decreased performance in QA tasks by incorporating designed causal instructions. By leveraging this method, we aim to enhance the model's ability to identify areas of uncertainty. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed uncertainty-sensitive tuning method significantly improves the performance of the Llama2-chat-7B model. Specifically, it achieves a substantial 34.7% improvement in handling questions involving knowledge gaps compared to the original model. Moreover, our approach outperforms GPT-4, exhibiting a 9.4% increase in overall performance. We open-source the model and code on GitHub.

With the advancement of language models (LMs), their exposure to private data is increasingly inevitable, and their deployment (especially for smaller ones) on personal devices, such as PCs and smartphones, has become a prevailing trend. In contexts laden with user information, enabling models to both safeguard user privacy and execute commands efficiently emerges as an essential research imperative. In this paper, we propose CoGenesis, a collaborative generation framework integrating large (hosted on cloud infrastructure) and small models (deployed on local devices) to address privacy concerns logically. Initially, we design a pipeline to create personalized writing instruction datasets enriched with extensive context details as the testbed of this research issue. Subsequently, we introduce two variants of CoGenesis based on sketch and logits respectively. Our experimental findings, based on our synthesized dataset and two additional open-source datasets, indicate that: 1) Large-scale models perform well when provided with user context but struggle in the absence of such context. 2) While specialized smaller models fine-tuned on the synthetic dataset show promise, they still lag behind their larger counterparts. 3) Our CoGenesis framework, utilizing mixed-scale models, showcases competitive performance, providing a feasible solution to privacy issues.

Instruction finetuning on a variety of image-text instruction data is the key to obtaining a versatile Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM), and different configurations of the instruction data can lead to finetuned models with different capabilities. However, we have discovered that data conflicts are inevitable when mixing instruction data from distinct domains, which can result in performance drops for tasks of a specific domain. To address this issue, we propose to apply an efficient Mixture of Experts (MoE) design, which is a sparse Mixture of LoRA Experts (MoLE) for instruction finetuning MLLMs. Within the Transformer layers, we extend the popular Low-Rank Adaption (LoRA) method by creating a set of LoRA experts specifically for the MLP layer, and route each token to the top-1 expert based on a routing function, allowing adaptive choices for tokens from different domains. Since the LoRA experts are sparsely activated, the training and inference cost are kept roughly constant compared to the original LoRA method. By replacing the plain-LoRA of LLaVA-1.5 with our MoE design, our final model is named LLaVA-MoLE. Extensive experiments proved that LLaVA-MoLE effectively mitigates the data conflict issue when mixing multiple distinct instruction datasets with various configurations, and achieves consistent performance gains over the strong plain-LoRA baselines. Most importantly, on the mixed datasets, LLaVA-MoLE can even outperform the plain-LoRA baseline trained with twice the samples.

This project focuses on enhancing open-source large language models through instruction-tuning and providing comprehensive evaluations of their performance. We explore how various training data factors, such as quantity, quality, and linguistic distribution, influence the performance of instruction-tuned models trained on publicly accessible high-quality instruction datasets for both English and Chinese languages. Our goal is to supplement evaluation with quantitative analyses, providing valuable insights for the continued advancement of open-source chat models. Our model, data, and code are publicly available for others to use and build upon.

Instruction tuning has significantly advanced large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, enabling them to align with human instructions across diverse tasks. However, progress in open vision-language models (VLMs) has been limited due to the scarcity of high-quality instruction datasets. To tackle this challenge and promote research in the vision-language field, we introduce the Multi-Modal, Multilingual Instruction Tuning (M^3IT) dataset, designed to optimize VLM alignment with human instructions. Our M^3IT dataset comprises 40 carefully curated datasets, including 2.4 million instances and 400 manually written task instructions, reformatted into a vision-to-text structure. Key tasks are translated into 80 languages with an advanced translation system, ensuring broader accessibility. M^3IT surpasses previous datasets regarding task coverage, instruction number and instance scale. Moreover, we develop Ying-VLM, a VLM model trained on our M^3IT dataset, showcasing its potential to answer complex questions requiring world knowledge, generalize to unseen video tasks, and comprehend unseen instructions in Chinese. To encourage further research, we have open-sourced both the dataset and trained models.

Recent advances in large vision-language models (LVLMs) have demonstrated strong performance on general-purpose medical tasks. However, their effectiveness in specialized domains such as dentistry remains underexplored. In particular, panoramic X-rays, a widely used imaging modality in oral radiology, pose interpretative challenges due to dense anatomical structures and subtle pathological cues, which are not captured by existing medical benchmarks or instruction datasets. To this end, we introduce MMOral, the first large-scale multimodal instruction dataset and benchmark tailored for panoramic X-ray interpretation. MMOral consists of 20,563 annotated images paired with 1.3 million instruction-following instances across diverse task types, including attribute extraction, report generation, visual question answering, and image-grounded dialogue. In addition, we present MMOral-Bench, a comprehensive evaluation suite covering five key diagnostic dimensions in dentistry. We evaluate 64 LVLMs on MMOral-Bench and find that even the best-performing model, i.e., GPT-4o, only achieves 41.45% accuracy, revealing significant limitations of current models in this domain. To promote the progress of this specific domain, we also propose OralGPT, which conducts supervised fine-tuning (SFT) upon Qwen2.5-VL-7B with our meticulously curated MMOral instruction dataset. Remarkably, a single epoch of SFT yields substantial performance enhancements for LVLMs, e.g., OralGPT demonstrates a 24.73% improvement. Both MMOral and OralGPT hold significant potential as a critical foundation for intelligent dentistry and enable more clinically impactful multimodal AI systems in the dental field. The dataset, model, benchmark, and evaluation suite are available at https://github.com/isbrycee/OralGPT.

Most public instruction finetuning datasets are relatively small compared to the closed source datasets used to train industry models. To study questions about finetuning at scale, such as curricula and learning rate cooldown schedules, there is a need for industrial-scale datasets. However, this scale necessitates a data generation process that is almost entirely automated. In this work, we study methods for generating large instruction datasets from a single prompt. With little human oversight, we get LLMs to write diverse sets of instruction examples ranging from simple completion tasks to complex multi-turn dialogs across a variety of subject areas. When finetuning a Llama-3 8B base model, our dataset meets or exceeds both WizardLM and Ultrachat on both knowledge-intensive leaderboard tasks as well as conversational evaluations. We release our dataset, the "generator" prompts that created it, and our finetuned model checkpoints.

Finetuning large language models on instruction data is crucial for enhancing pre-trained knowledge and improving instruction-following capabilities. As instruction datasets proliferate, selecting optimal data for effective training becomes increasingly important. This work addresses the question: How can we determine the optimal subset of data for effective training? While existing research often emphasizes local criteria like instance quality for subset selection, we argue that a global approach focused on data diversity is more critical. Our method employs k-means clustering to ensure the selected subset effectively represents the full dataset. We propose an iterative refinement method inspired by active learning techniques to resample instances from clusters, reassessing each cluster's importance and sampling weight in every training iteration. This approach reduces the effect of outliers and automatically filters out clusters containing low-quality data. Through extensive evaluation across natural language reasoning, general world knowledge, code and math reasoning tasks, and by fine-tuning models from various families, we observe consistent improvements, achieving a 7% increase over random selection and a 3.8% improvement over state-of-the-art sampling methods. Our work highlights the significance of diversity-first sampling when finetuning LLMs to enhance performance across a broad array of evaluation tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/for-ai/iterative-data-selection.

Recent long-form video-language understanding benchmarks have driven progress in video large multimodal models (Video-LMMs). However, the scarcity of well-annotated long videos has left the training of hour-long Video-LLMs underexplored. To close this gap, we present VideoMarathon, a large-scale hour-long video instruction-following dataset. This dataset includes around 9,700 hours of long videos sourced from diverse domains, ranging from 3 to 60 minutes per video. Specifically, it contains 3.3M high-quality QA pairs, spanning six fundamental topics: temporality, spatiality, object, action, scene, and event. Compared to existing video instruction datasets, VideoMarathon significantly extends training video durations up to 1 hour, and supports 22 diverse tasks requiring both short- and long-term video comprehension. Building on VideoMarathon, we propose Hour-LLaVA, a powerful and efficient Video-LMM for hour-scale video-language modeling. It enables hour-long video training and inference at 1-FPS sampling by leveraging a memory augmentation module, which adaptively integrates user question-relevant and spatiotemporal-informative semantics from a cached full video context. In our experiments, Hour-LLaVA achieves the best performance on multiple long video-language benchmarks, demonstrating the high quality of the VideoMarathon dataset and the superiority of the Hour-LLaVA model.

This paper introduces MM-Instruct, a large-scale dataset of diverse and high-quality visual instruction data designed to enhance the instruction-following capabilities of large multimodal models (LMMs). While existing visual instruction datasets often focus on question-answering, they struggle to generalize to broader application scenarios such as creative writing, summarization, or image analysis. To address these limitations, we propose a novel approach to constructing MM-Instruct that leverages the strong instruction-following capabilities of existing LLMs to generate novel visual instruction data from large-scale but conventional image captioning datasets. MM-Instruct first leverages ChatGPT to automatically generate diverse instructions from a small set of seed instructions through augmenting and summarization. It then matches these instructions with images and uses an open-sourced large language model (LLM) to generate coherent answers to the instruction-image pairs. The LLM is grounded by the detailed text descriptions of images in the whole answer generation process to guarantee the alignment of the instruction data. Moreover, we introduce a benchmark based on the generated instruction data to evaluate the instruction-following capabilities of existing LMMs. We demonstrate the effectiveness of MM-Instruct by training a LLaVA-1.5 model on the generated data, denoted as LLaVA-Instruct, which exhibits significant improvements in instruction-following capabilities compared to LLaVA-1.5 models. The MM-Instruct dataset, benchmark, and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/jihaonew/MM-Instruct.

Code data has been shown to enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), but it remains unclear which aspects of code are most responsible. We investigate this question with a systematic, data-centric framework. We construct parallel instruction datasets in ten programming languages and apply controlled perturbations that selectively disrupt structural or semantic properties of code. We then finetune LLMs from five model families and eight scales on each variant and evaluate their performance on natural language, math, and code tasks. Across 3,331 experiments, our results show that LLMs are more vulnerable to structural perturbations than semantic ones, particularly on math and code tasks. Appropriate abstractions like pseudocode and flowcharts can be as effective as code, while encoding the same information with fewer tokens without adhering to original syntax can often retain or even improve performance. Remarkably, even corrupted code with misleading signals remains competitive when surface-level regularities persist. Finally, syntactic styles also shape task-specific gains with Python favoring natural language reasoning and lower-level languages such as Java and Rust favoring math. Through our systematic framework, we aim to provide insight into how different properties of code influence reasoning and inform the design of training data for enhancing LLM reasoning capabilities.

Existing code large language models (LLMs) often rely on large-scale instruction data distilled from proprietary LLMs for fine-tuning, which typically incurs high costs. In this paper, we explore the potential of small-scale open-source LLMs (e.g., 7B) as synthesizers for high-quality code instruction data construction. We first observe that the data synthesis capability of small-scale LLMs can be enhanced by training on a few superior data synthesis samples from proprietary LLMs. Building on this, we propose a novel iterative self-distillation approach to bootstrap small-scale LLMs, transforming them into powerful synthesizers that reduce reliance on proprietary LLMs and minimize costs. Concretely, in each iteration, to obtain diverse and high-quality self-distilled data, we design multi-checkpoint sampling and multi-aspect scoring strategies for initial data selection. Furthermore, to identify the most influential samples, we introduce a gradient-based influence estimation method for final data filtering. Based on the code instruction datasets from the small-scale synthesizers, we develop SCoder, a family of code generation models fine-tuned from DeepSeek-Coder. SCoder models achieve state-of-the-art code generation capabilities, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method.

Benefiting from diverse instruction datasets, contemporary Large Language Models (LLMs) perform effectively as AI assistants in collaborating with humans. However, LLMs still struggle to generate natural and colloquial responses in real-world applications such as chatbots and psychological counseling that require more human-like interactions. To address these limitations, we introduce NICO, a Natural Interactive COnversation dataset in Chinese. We first use GPT-4-turbo to generate dialogue drafts and make them cover 20 daily-life topics and 5 types of social interactions. Then, we hire workers to revise these dialogues to ensure that they are free of grammatical errors and unnatural utterances. We define two dialogue-level natural conversation tasks and two sentence-level tasks for identifying and rewriting unnatural sentences. Multiple open-source and closed-source LLMs are tested and analyzed in detail. The experimental results highlight the challenge of the tasks and demonstrate how NICO can help foster the natural dialogue capabilities of LLMs. The dataset will be released.

High-quality instruction data is critical for aligning large language models (LLMs). Although some models, such as Llama-3-Instruct, have open weights, their alignment data remain private, which hinders the democratization of AI. High human labor costs and a limited, predefined scope for prompting prevent existing open-source data creation methods from scaling effectively, potentially limiting the diversity and quality of public alignment datasets. Is it possible to synthesize high-quality instruction data at scale by extracting it directly from an aligned LLM? We present a self-synthesis method for generating large-scale alignment data named Magpie. Our key observation is that aligned LLMs like Llama-3-Instruct can generate a user query when we input only the left-side templates up to the position reserved for user messages, thanks to their auto-regressive nature. We use this method to prompt Llama-3-Instruct and generate 4 million instructions along with their corresponding responses. We perform a comprehensive analysis of the extracted data and select 300K high-quality instances. To compare Magpie data with other public instruction datasets, we fine-tune Llama-3-8B-Base with each dataset and evaluate the performance of the fine-tuned models. Our results indicate that in some tasks, models fine-tuned with Magpie perform comparably to the official Llama-3-8B-Instruct, despite the latter being enhanced with 10 million data points through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and subsequent feedback learning. We also show that using Magpie solely for SFT can surpass the performance of previous public datasets utilized for both SFT and preference optimization, such as direct preference optimization with UltraFeedback. This advantage is evident on alignment benchmarks such as AlpacaEval, ArenaHard, and WildBench.

Despite the progress made by multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in computational pathology, they remain limited by a predominant focus on patch-level analysis, missing essential contextual information at the whole-slide level. The lack of large-scale instruction datasets and the gigapixel scale of whole slide images (WSIs) pose significant developmental challenges. In this paper, we present SlideChat, the first vision-language assistant capable of understanding gigapixel whole-slide images, exhibiting excellent multimodal conversational capability and response complex instruction across diverse pathology scenarios. To support its development, we created SlideInstruction, the largest instruction-following dataset for WSIs consisting of 4.2K WSI captions and 176K VQA pairs with multiple categories. Furthermore, we propose SlideBench, a multimodal benchmark that incorporates captioning and VQA tasks to assess SlideChat's capabilities in varied clinical settings such as microscopy, diagnosis. Compared to both general and specialized MLLMs, SlideChat exhibits exceptional capabilities achieving state-of-the-art performance on 18 of 22 tasks. For example, it achieved an overall accuracy of 81.17% on SlideBench-VQA (TCGA), and 54.15% on SlideBench-VQA (BCNB). We will fully release SlideChat, SlideInstruction and SlideBench as open-source resources to facilitate research and development in computational pathology.

Large language models (LLMs) have rapidly evolved as the foundation of various natural language processing (NLP) applications. Despite their wide use cases, their understanding of culturally-related concepts and reasoning remains limited. Meantime, there is a significant need to enhance these models' cultural reasoning capabilities, especially concerning underrepresented regions. This paper introduces a novel pipeline for extracting high-quality, culturally-related instruction tuning datasets from vast unstructured corpora. We utilize a self-instruction generation pipeline to identify cultural concepts and trigger instruction. By integrating with a general-purpose instruction tuning dataset, our model demonstrates enhanced capabilities in recognizing and understanding regional cultural nuances, thereby enhancing its reasoning capabilities. We conduct experiments across three regions: Singapore, the Philippines, and the United States, achieving performance improvement of up to 6%. Our research opens new avenues for extracting cultural instruction tuning sets directly from unstructured data, setting a precedent for future innovations in the field.

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the field of AI, demonstrating unprecedented capacity across various tasks. However, the inference process for LLMs comes with significant computational costs. In this paper, we propose an efficient LLM inference pipeline that harnesses the power of LLMs. Our approach begins by tapping into the potential of LLMs to accurately perceive and predict the response length with minimal overhead. By leveraging this information, we introduce an efficient sequence scheduling technique that groups queries with similar response lengths into micro-batches. We evaluate our approach on real-world instruction datasets using the LLaMA-based model, and our results demonstrate an impressive 86% improvement in inference throughput without compromising effectiveness. Notably, our method is orthogonal to other inference acceleration techniques, making it a valuable addition to many existing toolkits (e.g., FlashAttention, Quantization) for LLM inference.

Recent developments of multi-modal large language models have demonstrated its strong ability in solving vision-language tasks. In this paper, we focus on the product understanding task, which plays an essential role in enhancing online shopping experience. Product understanding task includes a variety of sub-tasks, which require models to respond diverse queries based on multi-modal product information. Traditional methods design distinct model architectures for each sub-task. On the contrary, we present PUMGPT, a large vision-language model aims at unifying all product understanding tasks under a singular model structure. To bridge the gap between vision and text representations, we propose Layer-wise Adapters (LA), an approach that provides enhanced alignment with fewer visual tokens and enables parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Moreover, the inherent parameter-efficient fine-tuning ability allows PUMGPT to be readily adapted to new product understanding tasks and emerging products. We design instruction templates to generate diverse product instruction datasets. Simultaneously, we utilize open-domain datasets during training to improve the performance of PUMGPT and its generalization ability. Through extensive evaluations, PUMGPT demonstrates its superior performance across multiple product understanding tasks, including product captioning, category question-answering, attribute extraction, attribute question-answering, and even free-form question-answering about products.

Large Language Models have achieved strong performance on reasoning tasks, solving competition-level coding and math problems. However, their scalability is limited by human-labeled datasets and the lack of large-scale, challenging coding problem training data. Existing competitive coding datasets contain only thousands to tens of thousands of problems. Previous synthetic data generation methods rely on either augmenting existing instruction datasets or selecting challenging problems from human-labeled data. In this paper, we propose QueST, a novel framework which combines difficulty-aware graph sampling and difficulty-aware rejection fine-tuning that directly optimizes specialized generators to create challenging coding problems. Our trained generators demonstrate superior capability compared to even GPT-4o at creating challenging problems that benefit downstream performance. We leverage QueST to generate large-scale synthetic coding problems, which we then use to distill from strong teacher models with long chain-of-thought or to conduct reinforcement learning for smaller models, proving effective in both scenarios. Our distillation experiments demonstrate significant performance gains. Specifically, after fine-tuning Qwen3-8B-base on 100K difficult problems generated by QueST, we surpass the performance of the original Qwen3-8B on LiveCodeBench. With an additional 112K examples (i.e., 28K human-written problems paired with multiple synthetic solutions), our 8B model matches the performance of the much larger DeepSeek-R1-671B. These findings indicate that generating complex problems via QueST offers an effective and scalable approach to advancing the frontiers of competitive coding and reasoning for large language models.

Do we fully leverage the potential of visual encoder in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs)? The recent outstanding performance of MLLMs in multimodal understanding has garnered broad attention from both academia and industry. In the current MLLM rat race, the focus seems to be predominantly on the linguistic side. We witness the rise of larger and higher-quality instruction datasets, as well as the involvement of larger-sized LLMs. Yet, scant attention has been directed towards the visual signals utilized by MLLMs, often assumed to be the final high-level features extracted by a frozen visual encoder. In this paper, we introduce the Dense Connector - a simple, effective, and plug-and-play vision-language connector that significantly enhances existing MLLMs by leveraging multi-layer visual features, with minimal additional computational overhead. Furthermore, our model, trained solely on images, showcases remarkable zero-shot capabilities in video understanding as well. Experimental results across various vision encoders, image resolutions, training dataset scales, varying sizes of LLMs (2.7B->70B), and diverse architectures of MLLMs (e.g., LLaVA and Mini-Gemini) validate the versatility and scalability of our approach, achieving state-of-the-art performance on across 19 image and video benchmarks. We hope that this work will provide valuable experience and serve as a basic module for future MLLM development.

The cultivation of expertise for large language models (LLMs) to solve tasks of specific areas often requires special-purpose tuning with calibrated behaviors on the expected stable outputs. To avoid huge cost brought by manual preparation of instruction datasets and training resources up to hundreds of hours, the exploitation of open knowledge including a wealth of low rank adaptation (LoRA) models and instruction datasets serves as a good starting point. However, existing methods on model and data selection focus on the performance of general-purpose capabilities while neglecting the knowledge gap exposed in domain-specific deployment. In the present study, we propose to bridge such gap by introducing few human-annotated samples (i.e., K-shot) for advancing task expertise of LLMs with open knowledge. Specifically, we develop an efficient and scalable pipeline to cost-efficiently produce task experts where K-shot data intervene in selecting the most promising expert candidates and the task-relevant instructions. A mixture-of-expert (MoE) system is built to make the best use of individual-yet-complementary knowledge between multiple experts. We unveil the two keys to the success of a MoE system, 1) the abidance by K-shot, and 2) the insistence on diversity. For the former, we ensure that models that truly possess problem-solving abilities on K-shot are selected rather than those blind guessers. Besides, during data selection, instructions that share task-relevant contexts with K-shot are prioritized. For the latter, we highlight the diversity of constituting experts and that of the fine-tuning instructions throughout the model and data selection process. Extensive experimental results confirm the superiority of our approach over existing methods on utilization of open knowledge across various tasks. Codes and models will be released later.

Instructing language models with user intent requires large instruction datasets, which are only available for a limited set of languages. In this paper, we explore alternatives to conventional instruction adaptation pipelines in low-resource scenarios. We assume a realistic scenario for low-resource languages, where only the following are available: corpora in the target language, existing open-weight multilingual base and instructed backbone LLMs, and synthetically generated instructions sampled from the instructed backbone. We present a comprehensive set of experiments for Basque that systematically study different combinations of these components evaluated on benchmarks and human preferences from 1,680 participants. Our conclusions show that target language corpora are essential, with synthetic instructions yielding robust models, and, most importantly, that using as backbone an instruction-tuned model outperforms using a base non-instructed model, and improved results when scaling up. Using Llama 3.1 instruct 70B as backbone our model comes near frontier models of much larger sizes for Basque, without using any Basque data apart from the 1.2B word corpora. We release code, models, instruction datasets, and human preferences to support full reproducibility in future research on low-resource language adaptation.

Pretrained visual-language models have demonstrated impressive zero-shot abilities in image captioning, when accompanied by hand-crafted prompts. Meanwhile, hand-crafted prompts utilize human prior knowledge to guide the model. However, due to the diversity between different domains, such hand-crafted prompt that provide invariant prior knowledge may result in mode collapse for some domains. Some researches attempted to incorporate expert knowledge and instruction datasets, but the results were costly and led to hallucinations. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised prompt learning method to improve Generalization of Image Captioning (GeneIC), which learns a domain-specific prompt vector for the target domain without requiring annotated data. GeneIC aligns visual and language modalities with a pre-trained Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) model, thus optimizing the domain-specific prompt vector from two aspects: attribute and semantic consistency. Specifically, GeneIC first generates attribute-transferred images with differing attributes, while retaining semantic similarity with original images. Then, GeneIC uses CLIP to measure the similarity between the images and the generated sentences. By exploring the variable and invariant features in the original images and attribute-transferred images, attribute consistency constrains the attribute change direction of both images and sentences to learn domain-specific knowledge. The semantic consistency directly measures the similarity between the generated sentences and images to ensure the accuracy and comprehensiveness of the generated sentences. Consequently, GeneIC only optimizes the prompt vectors, which effectively retains the knowledge in the large model and introduces domain-specific knowledge.

Despite significant progress in applying large language models (LLMs) to the medical domain, several limitations still prevent them from practical applications. Among these are the constraints on model size and the lack of cohort-specific labeled datasets. In this work, we investigated the potential of improving a lightweight LLM, such as Llama 3.1-8B, through fine-tuning with datasets using synthetic labels. Two tasks are jointly trained by combining their respective instruction datasets. When the quality of the task-specific synthetic labels is relatively high (e.g., generated by GPT4- o), Llama 3.1-8B achieves satisfactory performance on the open-ended disease detection task, with a micro F1 score of 0.91. Conversely, when the quality of the task-relevant synthetic labels is relatively low (e.g., from the MIMIC-CXR dataset), fine-tuned Llama 3.1-8B is able to surpass its noisy teacher labels (micro F1 score of 0.67 v.s. 0.63) when calibrated against curated labels, indicating the strong inherent underlying capability of the model. These findings demonstrate the potential of fine-tuning LLMs with synthetic labels, offering a promising direction for future research on LLM specialization in the medical domain.

Extending large language models to effectively handle long contexts requires instruction fine-tuning on input sequences of similar length. To address this, we present LongAlign -- a recipe of the instruction data, training, and evaluation for long context alignment. First, we construct a long instruction-following dataset using Self-Instruct. To ensure the data diversity, it covers a broad range of tasks from various long context sources. Second, we adopt the packing and sorted batching strategies to speed up supervised fine-tuning on data with varied length distributions. Additionally, we develop a loss weighting method to balance the contribution to the loss across different sequences during packing training. Third, we introduce the LongBench-Chat benchmark for evaluating instruction-following capabilities on queries of 10k-100k in length. Experiments show that LongAlign outperforms existing recipes for LLMs in long context tasks by up to 30\%, while also maintaining their proficiency in handling short, generic tasks. The code, data, and long-aligned models are open-sourced at https://github.com/THUDM/LongAlign.

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit cognitive biases -- systematic tendencies of irrational decision-making, similar to those seen in humans. Prior work has found that these biases vary across models and can be amplified by instruction tuning. However, it remains unclear if these differences in biases stem from pretraining, finetuning, or even random noise due to training stochasticity. We propose a two-step causal experimental approach to disentangle these factors. First, we finetune models multiple times using different random seeds to study how training randomness affects over 30 cognitive biases. Second, we introduce cross-tuning -- swapping instruction datasets between models to isolate bias sources. This swap uses datasets that led to different bias patterns, directly testing whether biases are dataset-dependent. Our findings reveal that while training randomness introduces some variability, biases are mainly shaped by pretraining: models with the same pretrained backbone exhibit more similar bias patterns than those sharing only finetuning data. These insights suggest that understanding biases in finetuned models requires considering their pretraining origins beyond finetuning effects. This perspective can guide future efforts to develop principled strategies for evaluating and mitigating bias in LLMs.

Visual instruction tuning refines pre-trained Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to enhance their real-world task performance. However, the rapid expansion of visual instruction datasets introduces significant data redundancy, leading to excessive computational costs. Existing data selection methods predominantly rely on proxy models or loss-based metrics, both of which impose substantial computational overheads due to the necessity of model inference and backpropagation. To address this challenge, we propose PRISM, a novel training-free approach for efficient multimodal data selection. Unlike existing methods, PRISM eliminates the reliance on proxy models, warm-up pretraining, and gradient-based optimization. Instead, it leverages Pearson correlation analysis to quantify the intrinsic visual encoding properties of MLLMs, computing a task-specific correlation score to identify high-value instances. This not only enbles data-efficient selection,but maintains the original performance. Empirical evaluations across multiple MLLMs demonstrate that PRISM reduces the overall time required for visual instruction tuning and data selection to just 30% of conventional methods, while surpassing fully fine-tuned models across eight multimodal and three language understanding benchmarks, achieving a 101.7% relative improvement in final performance.

Current multimodal large language models (MLLMs) often underperform on mathematical problem-solving tasks that require fine-grained visual understanding. The limitation is largely attributable to inadequate perception of geometric primitives during image-level contrastive pre-training (e.g., CLIP). While recent efforts to improve math MLLMs have focused on scaling up mathematical visual instruction datasets and employing stronger LLM backbones, they often overlook persistent errors in visual recognition. In this paper, we systematically evaluate the visual grounding capabilities of state-of-the-art MLLMs and reveal a significant negative correlation between visual grounding accuracy and problem-solving performance, underscoring the critical role of fine-grained visual understanding. Notably, advanced models like GPT-4o exhibit a 70% error rate when identifying geometric entities, highlighting that this remains a key bottleneck in visual mathematical reasoning. To address this, we propose a novel approach, SVE-Math (Selective Vision-Enhanced Mathematical MLLM), featuring a geometric-grounded vision encoder and a feature router that dynamically adjusts the contribution of hierarchical visual feature maps. Our model recognizes accurate visual primitives and generates precise visual prompts tailored to the language model's reasoning needs. In experiments, SVE-Math-Qwen2.5-7B outperforms other 7B models by 15% on MathVerse and is compatible with GPT-4V on MathVista. Despite being trained on smaller datasets, SVE-Math-7B achieves competitive performance on GeoQA, rivaling models trained on significantly larger datasets. Our findings emphasize the importance of incorporating fine-grained visual understanding into MLLMs and provide a promising direction for future research.

Vision-and-language navigation (VLN) requires an embodied agent to navigate in realistic 3D environments using natural language instructions. Existing VLN methods suffer from training on small-scale environments or unreasonable path-instruction datasets, limiting the generalization to unseen environments. There are massive house tour videos on YouTube, providing abundant real navigation experiences and layout information. However, these videos have not been explored for VLN before. In this paper, we propose to learn an agent from these videos by creating a large-scale dataset which comprises reasonable path-instruction pairs from house tour videos and pre-training the agent on it. To achieve this, we have to tackle the challenges of automatically constructing path-instruction pairs and exploiting real layout knowledge from raw and unlabeled videos. To address these, we first leverage an entropy-based method to construct the nodes of a path trajectory. Then, we propose an action-aware generator for generating instructions from unlabeled trajectories. Last, we devise a trajectory judgment pretext task to encourage the agent to mine the layout knowledge. Experimental results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on two popular benchmarks (R2R and REVERIE). Code is available at https://github.com/JeremyLinky/YouTube-VLN

The development of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has seen significant advancements. However, the quantity and quality of multimodal instruction data have emerged as significant bottlenecks in their progress. Manually creating multimodal instruction data is both time-consuming and inefficient, posing challenges in producing instructions of high complexity. Moreover, distilling instruction data from black-box commercial models (e.g., GPT-4o, GPT-4V) often results in simplistic instruction data, which constrains performance to that of these models. The challenge of curating diverse and complex instruction data remains substantial. We propose MMEvol, a novel multimodal instruction data evolution framework that combines fine-grained perception evolution, cognitive reasoning evolution, and interaction evolution. This iterative approach breaks through data quality bottlenecks to generate a complex and diverse image-text instruction dataset, thereby empowering MLLMs with enhanced capabilities. Beginning with an initial set of instructions, SEED-163K, we utilize MMEvol to systematically broadens the diversity of instruction types, integrates reasoning steps to enhance cognitive capabilities, and extracts detailed information from images to improve visual understanding and robustness. To comprehensively evaluate the effectiveness of our data, we train LLaVA-NeXT using the evolved data and conduct experiments across 13 vision-language tasks. Compared to the baseline trained with seed data, our approach achieves an average accuracy improvement of 3.1 points and reaches state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on 9 of these tasks.

Despite a widespread success in various applications, large language models (LLMs) often stumble when tackling basic physical reasoning or executing robotics tasks, due to a lack of direct experience with the physical nuances of the real world. To address these issues, we propose a Grounding Large language model with Imperfect world MOdel (GLIMO), which utilizes proxy world models such as simulators to collect and synthesize trining data. GLIMO incorporates an LLM agent-based data generator to automatically create high-quality and diverse instruction datasets. The generator includes an iterative self-refining module for temporally consistent experience sampling, a diverse set of question-answering instruction seeds, and a retrieval-augmented generation module for reflecting on prior experiences. Comprehensive experiments show that our approach improve the performance of strong open-source LLMs like LLaMA-3 with a performance boost of 2.04 times, 1.54 times, and 1.82 times across three different benchmarks, respectively. The performance is able to compete with or surpass their larger counterparts such as GPT-4.

Understanding molecules is key to understanding organisms and driving advances in drug discovery, requiring interdisciplinary knowledge across chemistry and biology. Although large molecular language models have achieved notable success in interpreting molecular structures, their instruction datasets are limited to the specific knowledge from task-oriented datasets and do not fully cover the fundamental characteristics of molecules, hindering their abilities as general-purpose molecular assistants. To address this issue, we propose Mol-LLaMA, a large molecular language model that grasps the general knowledge centered on molecules via multi-modal instruction tuning. To this end, we design key data types that encompass the fundamental features of molecules, incorporating essential knowledge from molecular structures. In addition, to improve understanding of molecular features, we introduce a module that integrates complementary information from different molecular encoders, leveraging the distinct advantages of different molecular representations. Our experimental results demonstrate that Mol-LLaMA is capable of comprehending the general features of molecules and generating relevant responses to users' queries with detailed explanations, implying its potential as a general-purpose assistant for molecular analysis.

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising solution for decomposing large language model representations into interpretable features. However, Paulo and Belrose (2025) have highlighted instability across different initialization seeds, and Heap et al. (2025) have pointed out that SAEs may not capture model-internal features. These problems likely stem from training SAEs on external datasets - either collected from the Web or generated by another model - which may contain out-of-distribution (OOD) data beyond the model's generalisation capabilities. This can result in hallucinated SAE features, which we term "Fake Features", that misrepresent the model's internal activations. To address these issues, we propose FaithfulSAE, a method that trains SAEs on the model's own synthetic dataset. Using FaithfulSAEs, we demonstrate that training SAEs on less-OOD instruction datasets results in SAEs being more stable across seeds. Notably, FaithfulSAEs outperform SAEs trained on web-based datasets in the SAE probing task and exhibit a lower Fake Feature Ratio in 5 out of 7 models. Overall, our approach eliminates the dependency on external datasets, advancing interpretability by better capturing model-internal features while highlighting the often neglected importance of SAE training datasets.

Large vision-language models (VLMs) face challenges in achieving robust, transferable reasoning abilities due to reliance on labor-intensive manual instruction datasets or computationally expensive self-supervised methods. To address these issues, we introduce MindGYM, a framework that enhances VLMs through synthetic self-challenging questions, consisting of three stages: (1) Seed Single-Hop Question Synthesis, generating cognitive questions across textual (e.g., logical deduction) and multimodal contexts (e.g., diagram-based queries) spanning eight semantic areas like ethical analysis; (2) Challenging Multi-Hop Question Synthesis, combining seed questions via diverse principles like bridging, visual-textual alignment, to create multi-step problems demanding deeper reasoning; and (3) Thinking-Induced Curriculum Fine-Tuning, a structured pipeline that progressively trains the model from scaffolded reasoning to standalone inference. By leveraging the model's self-synthesis capability, MindGYM achieves high data efficiency (e.g., +16% gains on MathVision-Mini with only 400 samples), computational efficiency (reducing both training and inference costs), and robust generalization across tasks. Extensive evaluations on seven benchmarks demonstrate superior performance over strong baselines, with notable improvements (+15.77% win rates) in reasoning depth and breadth validated via GPT-based scoring. MindGYM underscores the viability of self-challenging for refining VLM capabilities while minimizing human intervention and resource demands. Code and data are released to advance multimodal reasoning research.

We study continued training and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of a language model (LM) to make effective use of long-context information. We first establish a reliable evaluation protocol to guide model development -- Instead of perplexity or simple needle-in-a-haystack (NIAH) tests, we use a broad set of long-context tasks, and we evaluate models after SFT with instruction data as this better reveals long-context abilities. Supported by our robust evaluations, we run thorough experiments to decide the data mix for continued pre-training, the instruction tuning dataset, and many other design choices. We find that (1) code repositories and books are excellent sources of long data, but it is crucial to combine them with high-quality short data; (2) training with a sequence length beyond the evaluation length boosts long-context performance; (3) for SFT, using only short instruction datasets yields strong performance on long-context tasks. Our final model, ProLong-8B, which is initialized from Llama-3 and trained on 40B tokens, demonstrates state-of-the-art long-context performance among similarly sized models at a length of 128K. ProLong outperforms Llama-3.18B-Instruct on the majority of long-context tasks despite having seen only 5% as many tokens during long-context training. Additionally, ProLong can effectively process up to 512K tokens, one of the longest context windows of publicly available LMs.

This paper presents FinGEITje, the first Dutch financial Large Language Model (LLM) specifically designed and optimized for various financial tasks. Together with the model, we release a specialized Dutch financial instruction tuning dataset with over 140,000 samples, constructed employing an automated translation and data processing method. The open-source data construction method is provided, facilitating the creation of financial instruction datasets in different languages. To evaluate model performance, the study introduces the first Dutch financial evaluation benchmark, along with an automated evaluation method that utilizes an LLM as an independent evaluator, reducing manual intervention in performance evaluation. The experimental results highlight the superior performance of FinGEITje across five critical Dutch and English financial tasks.

In this paper, we introduce a novel fine-tuning technique for language models, which involves incorporating symmetric noise into the embedding process. This method aims to enhance the model's function by more stringently regulating its local curvature, demonstrating superior performance over the current method, NEFTune. When fine-tuning the LLaMA-2-7B model using Alpaca, standard techniques yield a 29.79% score on AlpacaEval. However, our approach, SymNoise, increases this score significantly to 69.04%, using symmetric noisy embeddings. This is a 6.7% improvement over the state-of-the-art method, NEFTune~(64.69%). Furthermore, when tested on various models and stronger baseline instruction datasets, such as Evol-Instruct, ShareGPT, OpenPlatypus, SymNoise consistently outperforms NEFTune. The current literature, including NEFTune, has underscored the importance of more in-depth research into the application of noise-based strategies in the fine-tuning of language models. Our approach, SymNoise, is another significant step towards this direction, showing notable improvement over the existing state-of-the-art method.

In Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), a visual projector plays a crucial role in bridging pre-trained vision encoders with LLMs, enabling profound visual understanding while harnessing the LLMs' robust capabilities. Despite the importance of the visual projector, it has been relatively less explored. In this study, we first identify two essential projector properties: (i) flexibility in managing the number of visual tokens, crucial for MLLMs' overall efficiency, and (ii) preservation of local context from visual features, vital for spatial understanding. Based on these findings, we propose a novel projector design that is both flexible and locality-enhanced, effectively satisfying the two desirable properties. Additionally, we present comprehensive strategies to effectively utilize multiple and multifaceted instruction datasets. Through extensive experiments, we examine the impact of individual design choices. Finally, our proposed MLLM, Honeybee, remarkably outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods across various benchmarks, including MME, MMBench, SEED-Bench, and LLaVA-Bench, achieving significantly higher efficiency. Code and models are available at https://github.com/kakaobrain/honeybee.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at understanding single images, aided by high-quality instruction datasets. However, multi-image reasoning remains underexplored in the open-source community due to two key challenges: (1) scaling datasets with correlated images and complex reasoning instructions is resource-intensive, and (2) robust evaluation benchmarks for multi-image tasks are lacking. To address this, we introduce SMiR, a synthetic data-generation pipeline for multi-image reasoning, along with a high-quality dataset generated using this pipeline. SMiR efficiently extracts correlated images via multimodal embeddings, integrates visual and descriptive information, and leverages open-source LLMs to generate quality instructions. Using this approach, we produce 160K synthetic training samples, offering a cost-effective alternative to closed-source solutions. Additionally, we present SMiR-Bench, a multi-image reasoning benchmark comprising 200 diverse examples across seven complex reasoning tasks. SMiR-Bench is multi-turn and employs a VLM judge to evaluate free-form responses, providing a comprehensive assessment of model expressiveness and reasoning capability across modalities. We demonstrate the effectiveness of SMiR by fine-tuning open-source VLMs and evaluating them on SMiR-Bench.

High-throughput reaction condition (RC) screening is fundamental to chemical synthesis. However, current RC screening suffers from laborious and costly trial-and-error workflows. Traditional computer-aided synthesis planning (CASP) tools fail to find suitable RCs due to data sparsity and inadequate reaction representations. Nowadays, large language models (LLMs) are capable of tackling chemistry-related problems, such as molecule design, and chemical logic Q\&A tasks. However, LLMs have not yet achieved accurate predictions of chemical reaction conditions. Here, we present MM-RCR, a text-augmented multimodal LLM that learns a unified reaction representation from SMILES, reaction graphs, and textual corpus for chemical reaction recommendation (RCR). To train MM-RCR, we construct 1.2 million pair-wised Q\&A instruction datasets. Our experimental results demonstrate that MM-RCR achieves state-of-the-art performance on two open benchmark datasets and exhibits strong generalization capabilities on out-of-domain (OOD) and High-Throughput Experimentation (HTE) datasets. MM-RCR has the potential to accelerate high-throughput condition screening in chemical synthesis.

We present QLoRA, an efficient finetuning approach that reduces memory usage enough to finetune a 65B parameter model on a single 48GB GPU while preserving full 16-bit finetuning task performance. QLoRA backpropagates gradients through a frozen, 4-bit quantized pretrained language model into Low Rank Adapters~(LoRA). Our best model family, which we name Guanaco, outperforms all previous openly released models on the Vicuna benchmark, reaching 99.3% of the performance level of ChatGPT while only requiring 24 hours of finetuning on a single GPU. QLoRA introduces a number of innovations to save memory without sacrificing performance: (a) 4-bit NormalFloat (NF4), a new data type that is information theoretically optimal for normally distributed weights (b) double quantization to reduce the average memory footprint by quantizing the quantization constants, and (c) paged optimziers to manage memory spikes. We use QLoRA to finetune more than 1,000 models, providing a detailed analysis of instruction following and chatbot performance across 8 instruction datasets, multiple model types (LLaMA, T5), and model scales that would be infeasible to run with regular finetuning (e.g. 33B and 65B parameter models). Our results show that QLoRA finetuning on a small high-quality dataset leads to state-of-the-art results, even when using smaller models than the previous SoTA. We provide a detailed analysis of chatbot performance based on both human and GPT-4 evaluations showing that GPT-4 evaluations are a cheap and reasonable alternative to human evaluation. Furthermore, we find that current chatbot benchmarks are not trustworthy to accurately evaluate the performance levels of chatbots. A lemon-picked analysis demonstrates where Guanaco fails compared to ChatGPT. We release all of our models and code, including CUDA kernels for 4-bit training.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a key paradigm for enhancing large language models (LLMs) by incorporating external knowledge. However, current RAG methods face two limitations: (1) they only cover limited RAG scenarios. (2) They suffer from limited task diversity due to the lack of a general RAG dataset. To address these limitations, we propose RAG-Instruct, a general method for synthesizing diverse and high-quality RAG instruction data based on any source corpus. Our approach leverages (1) five RAG paradigms, which encompass diverse query-document relationships, and (2) instruction simulation, which enhances instruction diversity and quality by utilizing the strengths of existing instruction datasets. Using this method, we construct a 40K instruction dataset from Wikipedia, comprehensively covering diverse RAG scenarios and tasks. Experiments demonstrate that RAG-Instruct effectively enhances LLMs' RAG capabilities, achieving strong zero-shot performance and significantly outperforming various RAG baselines across a diverse set of tasks. RAG-Instruct is publicly available at https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/RAG-Instruct.

Since the release of T\"ULU [Wang et al., 2023b], open resources for instruction tuning have developed quickly, from better base models to new finetuning techniques. We test and incorporate a number of these advances into T\"ULU, resulting in T\"ULU 2, a suite of improved T\"ULU models for advancing the understanding and best practices of adapting pretrained language models to downstream tasks and user preferences. Concretely, we release: (1) T\"ULU-V2-mix, an improved collection of high-quality instruction datasets; (2) T\"ULU 2, LLAMA-2 models finetuned on the V2 mixture; (3) T\"ULU 2+DPO, T\"ULU 2 models trained with direct preference optimization (DPO), including the largest DPO-trained model to date (T\"ULU 2+DPO 70B); (4) CODE T\"ULU 2, CODE LLAMA models finetuned on our V2 mix that outperform CODE LLAMA and its instruction-tuned variant, CODE LLAMA-Instruct. Our evaluation from multiple perspectives shows that the T\"ULU 2 suite achieves state-of-the-art performance among open models and matches or exceeds the performance of GPT-3.5-turbo-0301 on several benchmarks. We release all the checkpoints, data, training and evaluation code to facilitate future open efforts on adapting large language models.

Large "instruction-tuned" language models (finetuned to respond to instructions) have demonstrated a remarkable ability to generalize zero-shot to new tasks. Nevertheless, they depend heavily on human-written instruction data that is limited in quantity, diversity, and creativity, therefore hindering the generality of the tuned model. We introduce Self-Instruct, a framework for improving the instruction-following capabilities of pretrained language models by bootstrapping off its own generations. Our pipeline generates instruction, input, and output samples from a language model, then prunes them before using them to finetune the original model. Applying our method to vanilla GPT3, we demonstrate a 33% absolute improvement over the original model on Super-NaturalInstructions, on par with the performance of InstructGPT_001, which is trained with private user data and human annotations. For further evaluation, we curate a set of expert-written instructions for novel tasks, and show through human evaluation that tuning GPT3 with Self-Instruct outperforms using existing public instruction datasets by a large margin, leaving only a 5% absolute gap behind InstructGPT_001. Self-Instruct provides an almost annotation-free method for aligning pre-trained language models with instructions, and we release our large synthetic dataset to facilitate future studies on instruction tuning.

Typhoon is a series of Thai large language models (LLMs) developed specifically for the Thai language. This technical report presents challenges and insights in developing Thai LLMs, including data preparation, pretraining, instruction-tuning, and evaluation. As one of the challenges of low-resource languages is the amount of pretraining data, we apply continual training to transfer existing world knowledge from a strong LLM. To evaluate the Thai knowledge encapsulated in each model from the pretraining stage, we develop ThaiExam, a benchmark based on examinations for high-school students and investment professionals in Thailand. In addition, we fine-tune Typhoon to follow Thai instructions, and we evaluate instruction-tuned models on Thai instruction datasets as well as translation, summarization, and question-answering tasks. Experimental results on a suite of Thai benchmarks show that Typhoon outperforms all open-source Thai language models, and its performance is on par with GPT-3.5 in Thai while having only 7 billion parameters and being 2.62 times more efficient in tokenizing Thai text.

We present LLM-Blender, an ensembling framework designed to attain consistently superior performance by leveraging the diverse strengths of multiple open-source large language models (LLMs). Our framework consists of two modules: PairRanker and GenFuser, addressing the observation that optimal LLMs for different examples can significantly vary. PairRanker employs a specialized pairwise comparison method to distinguish subtle differences between candidate outputs. It jointly encodes the input text and a pair of candidates, using cross-attention encoders to determine the superior one. Our results demonstrate that PairRanker exhibits the highest correlation with ChatGPT-based ranking. Then, GenFuser aims to merge the top-ranked candidates, generating an improved output by capitalizing on their strengths and mitigating their weaknesses. To facilitate large-scale evaluation, we introduce a benchmark dataset, MixInstruct, which is a mixture of multiple instruction datasets featuring oracle pairwise comparisons. Our LLM-Blender significantly outperform individual LLMs and baseline methods across various metrics, establishing a substantial performance gap.

Large language models (LLMs) have made great progress in classification and text generation tasks. However, they are mainly trained on English data and often struggle with low-resource languages. In this study, we explore adding a new language, i.e., Persian, to Llama (a model with a limited understanding of Persian) using parameter-efficient fine-tuning. We employ a multi-stage approach involving pretraining on monolingual Persian data, aligning representations through bilingual pretraining and instruction datasets, and instruction-tuning with task-specific datasets. We evaluate the model's performance at each stage on generation and classification tasks. Our findings suggest that incorporating the Persian language, through bilingual data alignment, can enhance classification accuracy for Persian tasks, with no adverse impact and sometimes even improvements on English tasks. Additionally, the results highlight the model's initial strength as a critical factor when working with limited training data, with cross-lingual alignment offering minimal benefits for the low-resource language. Knowledge transfer from English to Persian has a marginal effect, primarily benefiting simple classification tasks.

We introduce DeSTA2.5-Audio, a general-purpose Large Audio Language Model (LALM) designed for robust auditory perception and instruction-following, without requiring task-specific audio instruction-tuning. Recent LALMs typically augment Large Language Models (LLMs) with auditory capabilities by training on large-scale, manually curated or LLM-synthesized audio-instruction datasets. However, these approaches have often suffered from the catastrophic forgetting of the LLM's original language abilities. To address this, we revisit the data construction pipeline and propose DeSTA, a self-generated cross-modal alignment strategy in which the backbone LLM generates its own training targets. This approach preserves the LLM's native language proficiency while establishing effective audio-text alignment, thereby enabling zero-shot generalization without task-specific tuning. Using DeSTA, we construct DeSTA-AQA5M, a large-scale, task-agnostic dataset containing 5 million training samples derived from 7,000 hours of audio spanning 50 diverse datasets, including speech, environmental sounds, and music. DeSTA2.5-Audio achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance across a wide range of audio-language benchmarks, including Dynamic-SUPERB, MMAU, SAKURA, Speech-IFEval, and VoiceBench. Comprehensive comparative studies demonstrate that our self-generated strategy outperforms widely adopted data construction and training strategies in both auditory perception and instruction-following capabilities. Our findings underscore the importance of carefully designed data construction in LALM development and offer practical insights for building robust, general-purpose LALMs.

Current instruction data synthesis methods primarily focus on single-turn instructions and often neglect cross-turn coherence, resulting in context drift and reduced task completion rates in extended conversations. To address this limitation, we propose Skeleton-Guided Multi-Turn Dialogue Generation, a framework that constrains multi-turn instruction synthesis by explicitly modeling human conversational intent. It operates in two stages: (1) Intent Modeling, which captures the global structure of human dialogues by assigning each conversation to one of nine well-defined intent trajectories, ensuring a coherent and goal-oriented information flow; and (2) Skeleton Generation, which constructs a structurally grounded sequence of user queries aligned with the modeled intent, thereby serving as a scaffold that constrains and guides the downstream instruction synthesis process. Based on this process, we construct ConsistentChat, a multi-turn instruction dataset with approximately 15,000 multi-turn conversations and 224,392 utterances. Experiments on the Light, Topdial, and MT-Eval benchmarks show that models fine-tuned on ConsistentChat achieve a 20-30% improvement in chat consistency and up to a 15% increase in task success rate, significantly outperforming models trained on existing single-turn and multi-turn instruction datasets.

Instruction tuning is crucial for enabling Large Language Models (LLMs) to solve real-world tasks. Prior work has shown the effectiveness of instruction-tuning data synthesized solely from LLMs, raising a fundamental question: Do we still need human-originated signals for instruction tuning? This work answers the question affirmatively: we build state-of-the-art instruction-tuning datasets sourced from human-written instructions, by simply pairing them with LLM-generated responses. LLMs fine-tuned on our datasets consistently outperform those fine-tuned on existing ones. Our data construction approach can be easily adapted to other languages; we build datasets for Japanese and confirm that LLMs tuned with our data reach state-of-the-art performance. Analyses suggest that instruction-tuning in a new language allows LLMs to follow instructions, while the tuned models exhibit a notable lack of culture-specific knowledge in that language. The datasets and fine-tuned models will be publicly available. Our datasets, synthesized with open-weight LLMs, are openly distributed under permissive licenses, allowing for diverse use cases.

Instruction tuning enhances large language models (LLMs) by aligning them with human preferences across diverse tasks. Traditional approaches to create instruction tuning datasets face serious challenges for low-resource languages due to their dependence on data annotation. This work introduces a novel method, Multilingual Reverse Instructions (MURI), which generates high-quality instruction tuning datasets for low-resource languages without requiring human annotators or pre-existing multilingual models. Utilizing reverse instructions and a translation pipeline, MURI produces instruction-output pairs from existing human-written texts in low-resource languages. This method ensures cultural relevance and diversity by sourcing texts from different native domains and applying filters to eliminate inappropriate content. Our dataset, MURI-IT, includes more than 2 million instruction-output pairs across 200 languages. Evaluation by native speakers and fine-tuning experiments with mT5 models demonstrate the approach's effectiveness for both NLU and open-ended generation. We publicly release datasets and models at https://github.com/akoksal/muri.

Relying on human experts to evaluate CEFR speaking assessments in an e-learning environment creates scalability challenges, as it limits how quickly and widely assessments can be conducted. We aim to automate the evaluation of CEFR B2 English speaking assessments in e-learning environments from conversation transcripts. First, we evaluate the capability of leading open source and commercial Large Language Models (LLMs) to score a candidate's performance across various criteria in the CEFR B2 speaking exam in both global and India-specific contexts. Next, we create a new expert-validated, CEFR-aligned synthetic conversational dataset with transcripts that are rated at different assessment scores. In addition, new instruction-tuned datasets are developed from the English Vocabulary Profile (up to CEFR B2 level) and the CEFR-SP WikiAuto datasets. Finally, using these new datasets, we perform parameter efficient instruction tuning of Mistral Instruct 7B v0.2 to develop a family of models called EvalYaks. Four models in this family are for assessing the four sections of the CEFR B2 speaking exam, one for identifying the CEFR level of vocabulary and generating level-specific vocabulary, and another for detecting the CEFR level of text and generating level-specific text. EvalYaks achieved an average acceptable accuracy of 96%, a degree of variation of 0.35 levels, and performed 3 times better than the next best model. This demonstrates that a 7B parameter LLM instruction tuned with high-quality CEFR-aligned assessment data can effectively evaluate and score CEFR B2 English speaking assessments, offering a promising solution for scalable, automated language proficiency evaluation.

We introduce Bonito, an open-source model for conditional task generation: the task of converting unannotated text into task-specific training datasets for instruction tuning. Our goal is to enable zero-shot task adaptation of large language models on users' specialized, private data. We train Bonito on a new large-scale dataset with 1.65M examples created by remixing existing instruction tuning datasets into meta-templates. The meta-templates for a dataset produce training examples where the input is the unannotated text and the task attribute and the output consists of the instruction and the response. We use Bonito to generate synthetic tasks for seven datasets from specialized domains across three task types -- yes-no question answering, extractive question answering, and natural language inference -- and adapt language models. We show that Bonito significantly improves the average performance of pretrained and instruction tuned models over the de facto self supervised baseline. For example, adapting Mistral-Instruct-v2 and instruction tuned variants of Mistral and Llama2 with Bonito improves the strong zero-shot performance by 22.1 F1 points whereas the next word prediction objective undoes some of the benefits of instruction tuning and reduces the average performance by 0.8 F1 points. We conduct additional experiments with Bonito to understand the effects of the domain, the size of the training set, and the choice of alternative synthetic task generators. Overall, we show that learning with synthetic instruction tuning datasets is an effective way to adapt language models to new domains. The model, dataset, and code are available at https://github.com/BatsResearch/bonito.

We aim to select data subsets for the fine-tuning of large language models to more effectively follow instructions. Prior work has emphasized the importance of diversity in dataset curation but relied on heuristics such as the number of tasks. In this paper, we use determinantal point processes to capture the diversity and quality of instruction tuning datasets for subset selection. We propose to measure dataset diversity with log determinant distance that is the distance between the dataset of interest and a maximally diverse reference dataset. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed diversity measure in the normalized weight gradient space is correlated with downstream instruction-following performance. Consequently, it can be used to inform when data selection is the most helpful and to analyze dataset curation strategies. We demonstrate the utility of our approach on various instruction tuning datasets.

We introduce Instruction Document Visual Question Answering (iDocVQA) dataset and Large Language Document (LLaDoc) model, for training Language-Vision (LV) models for document analysis and predictions on document images, respectively. Usually, deep neural networks for the DocVQA task are trained on datasets lacking instructions. We show that using instruction-following datasets improves performance. We compare performance across document-related datasets using the recent state-of-the-art (SotA) Large Language and Vision Assistant (LLaVA)1.5 as the base model. We also evaluate the performance of the derived models for object hallucination using the Polling-based Object Probing Evaluation (POPE) dataset. The results show that instruction-tuning performance ranges from 11X to 32X of zero-shot performance and from 0.1% to 4.2% over non-instruction (traditional task) finetuning. Despite the gains, these still fall short of human performance (94.36%), implying there's much room for improvement.

Existing research has demonstrated that refining large language models (LLMs) through the utilization of machine-generated instruction-following data empowers these models to exhibit impressive zero-shot capabilities for novel tasks, without requiring human-authored instructions. In this paper, we systematically investigate, preprocess, and integrate three Chinese instruction-following datasets with the aim of enhancing the Chinese conversational capabilities of Mixtral-8x7B sparse Mixture-of-Experts model. Through instruction fine-tuning on this carefully processed dataset, we successfully construct the Mixtral-8x7B sparse Mixture-of-Experts model named "Aurora." To assess the performance of Aurora, we utilize three widely recognized benchmark tests: C-Eval, MMLU, and CMMLU. Empirical studies validate the effectiveness of instruction fine-tuning applied to Mixtral-8x7B sparse Mixture-of-Experts model. This work is pioneering in the execution of instruction fine-tuning on a sparse expert-mixed model, marking a significant breakthrough in enhancing the capabilities of this model architecture. Our code, data and model are publicly available at https://github.com/WangRongsheng/Aurora

The performance of Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) is dependent on the size and quality of their training datasets. Existing video instruction tuning datasets lack diversity as they are derived by prompting large language models with video captions to generate question-answer pairs, and are therefore mostly descriptive. Meanwhile, many labeled video datasets with diverse labels and supervision exist - however, we find that their integration into LVLMs is non-trivial. Herein, we present Video Self-Training with augmented Reasoning (Video-STaR), the first video self-training approach. Video-STaR allows the utilization of any labeled video dataset for video instruction tuning. In Video-STaR, an LVLM cycles between instruction generation and finetuning, which we show (I) improves general video understanding and (II) adapts LVLMs to novel downstream tasks with existing supervision. During generation, an LVLM is prompted to propose an answer. The answers are then filtered only to those that contain the original video labels, and the LVLM is then re-trained on the generated dataset. By only training on generated answers that contain the correct video labels, Video-STaR utilizes these existing video labels as weak supervision for video instruction tuning. Our results demonstrate that Video-STaR-enhanced LVLMs exhibit improved performance in (I) general video QA, where TempCompass performance improved by 10%, and (II) on downstream tasks, where Video-STaR improved Kinetics700-QA accuracy by 20% and action quality assessment on FineDiving by 15%.

Despite the effectiveness of vision-language supervised fine-tuning in enhancing the performance of Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs). However, existing visual instruction tuning datasets include the following limitations: (1) Instruction annotation quality: despite existing VLLMs exhibiting strong performance, instructions generated by those advanced VLLMs may still suffer from inaccuracies, such as hallucinations. (2) Instructions and image diversity: the limited range of instruction types and the lack of diversity in image data may impact the model's ability to generate diversified and closer to real-world scenarios outputs. To address these challenges, we construct a high-quality, diverse visual instruction tuning dataset MMInstruct, which consists of 973K instructions from 24 domains. There are four instruction types: Judgement, Multiple-Choice, Long Visual Question Answering and Short Visual Question Answering. To construct MMInstruct, we propose an instruction generation data engine that leverages GPT-4V, GPT-3.5, and manual correction. Our instruction generation engine enables semi-automatic, low-cost, and multi-domain instruction generation at 1/6 the cost of manual construction. Through extensive experiment validation and ablation experiments, we demonstrate that MMInstruct could significantly improve the performance of VLLMs, e.g., the model fine-tuning on MMInstruct achieves new state-of-the-art performance on 10 out of 12 benchmarks. The code and data shall be available at https://github.com/yuecao0119/MMInstruct.

As large language models (LLMs) continue to advance, instruction tuning has become critical for improving their ability to generate accurate and contextually appropriate responses. Although numerous instruction-tuning datasets have been developed to enhance LLM performance, selecting high-quality instruction data from large source datasets typically demands significant human effort. In this work, we introduce IterSelectTune, an efficient, cost-effective iterative training policy for selecting high-quality instruction data with no human involvement and limited reliance on GPT-4. By fine-tuning on approximately 20\% of the source data, our method consistently outperforms models fine-tuned on the full dataset across multiple benchmarks and public test datasets. These results highlight the effectiveness of our approach in enhancing LLM performance while reducing the computational resources required for instruction tuning.

Recent work has shown the immense potential of synthetically generated datasets for training large language models (LLMs), especially for acquiring targeted skills. Current large-scale math instruction tuning datasets such as MetaMathQA (Yu et al., 2024) and MAmmoTH (Yue et al., 2024) are constructed using outputs from closed-source LLMs with commercially restrictive licenses. A key reason limiting the use of open-source LLMs in these data generation pipelines has been the wide gap between the mathematical skills of the best closed-source LLMs, such as GPT-4, and the best open-source LLMs. Building on the recent progress in open-source LLMs, our proposed prompting novelty, and some brute-force scaling, we construct OpenMathInstruct-1, a math instruction tuning dataset with 1.8M problem-solution pairs. The dataset is constructed by synthesizing code-interpreter solutions for GSM8K and MATH, two popular math reasoning benchmarks, using the recently released and permissively licensed Mixtral model. Our best model, OpenMath-CodeLlama-70B, trained on a subset of OpenMathInstruct-1, achieves a score of 84.6% on GSM8K and 50.7% on MATH, which is competitive with the best gpt-distilled models. We release our code, models, and the OpenMathInstruct-1 dataset under a commercially permissive license.

Recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) exhibit impressive abilities to perceive images and follow open-ended instructions. The capabilities of MLLMs depend on two crucial factors: the model architecture to facilitate the feature alignment of visual modules and large language models; the multimodal instruction tuning datasets for human instruction following. (i) For the model architecture, most existing models introduce an external bridge module to connect vision encoders with language models, which needs an additional feature-alignment pre-training. In this work, we discover that compact pre-trained vision language models can inherently serve as ``out-of-the-box'' bridges between vision and language. Based on this, we propose Muffin framework, which directly employs pre-trained vision-language models to act as providers of visual signals. (ii) For the multimodal instruction tuning datasets, existing methods omit the complementary relationship between different datasets and simply mix datasets from different tasks. Instead, we propose UniMM-Chat dataset which explores the complementarities of datasets to generate 1.1M high-quality and diverse multimodal instructions. We merge information describing the same image from diverse datasets and transforms it into more knowledge-intensive conversation data. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the Muffin framework and UniMM-Chat dataset. Muffin achieves state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of vision-language tasks, significantly surpassing state-of-the-art models like LLaVA and InstructBLIP. Our model and dataset are all accessible at https://github.com/thunlp/muffin.

Instruction Tuning involves finetuning a language model on a collection of instruction-formatted datasets in order to enhance the generalizability of the model to unseen tasks. Studies have shown the importance of balancing different task proportions during finetuning, but finding the right balance remains challenging. Unfortunately, there's currently no systematic method beyond manual tuning or relying on practitioners' intuition. In this paper, we introduce SMART (Submodular data Mixture strAtegy for instRuction Tuning) - a novel data mixture strategy which makes use of a submodular function to assign importance scores to tasks which are then used to determine the mixture weights. Given a fine-tuning budget, SMART redistributes the budget among tasks and selects non-redundant samples from each task. Experimental results demonstrate that SMART significantly outperforms traditional methods such as examples proportional mixing and equal mixing. Furthermore, SMART facilitates the creation of data mixtures based on a few representative subsets of tasks alone and through task pruning analysis, we reveal that in a limited budget setting, allocating budget among a subset of representative tasks yields superior performance compared to distributing the budget among all tasks. The code for reproducing our results is open-sourced at https://github.com/kowndinya-renduchintala/SMART.

Large language models typically undergo two training stages, pretraining and finetuning. Despite that large-scale pretraining endows the model with strong capabilities to generate natural language responses, these pretrained models can still fail to understand human instructions at times. To enhance language models' ability of interpreting and responding to instructions, instruction finetuning has emerged as a critical method in this area. Recent studies found that large language models can be finetuned to perform well even with a small amount of high-quality instruction-following data. However, the selection of high-quality datasets for finetuning language models still lacks clear guidelines to follow. In this paper, we propose InstructMining, a linear rule for evaluating instruction-following data quality. We formulate InstructMining using specific natural language indicators. To investigate the relationship between data quality and these indicators, we further conduct extensive finetuning experiments. The experiment results are then applied to estimating parameters in InstructMining. To further investigate its performance, we use InstructMining to select high-quality data from unseen datasets. Results demonstrate that InstructMining can help select relatively high-quality samples from various instruction-following datasets. Compared to models finetuned on unfiltered datasets, models finetuned on InstructMining selected datasets perform better on 42.5% cases.

Instruction tuning unlocks the superior capability of Large Language Models (LLM) to interact with humans. Furthermore, recent instruction-following datasets include images as visual inputs, collecting responses for image-based instructions. However, visual instruction-tuned models cannot comprehend textual details within images well. This work enhances the current visual instruction tuning pipeline with text-rich images (e.g., movie posters, book covers, etc.). Specifically, we first use publicly available OCR tools to collect results on 422K text-rich images from the LAION dataset. Moreover, we prompt text-only GPT-4 with recognized texts and image captions to generate 16K conversations, each containing question-answer pairs for text-rich images. By combining our collected data with previous multi-modal instruction-following data, our model, LLaVAR, substantially improves the LLaVA model's capability on text-based VQA datasets (up to 20% accuracy improvement) while achieving an accuracy of 91.42% on ScienceQA. The GPT-4-based instruction-following evaluation also demonstrates the improvement of our model on both natural images and text-rich images. Through qualitative analysis, LLaVAR shows promising interaction (e.g., reasoning, writing, and elaboration) skills with humans based on the latest real-world online content that combines text and images. We make our code/data/models publicly available at https://llavar.github.io/.

This work investigates whether small-scale LMs can benefit from instruction tuning. We compare conversational and question-answering instruction tuning datasets, applied either in a merged or sequential curriculum, using decoder-only models with 100M and 140M parameters. Evaluation spans both fine-tuning (SuperGLUE) and zero-shot (BLiMP, EWoK, WUGs, entity tracking, and psycholinguistic correlation) settings. Results show that instruction tuning yields small but consistent gains in fine-tuning scenarios, with sequential curricula outperforming merged data; however, improvements do not consistently transfer to zero-shot tasks, suggesting a trade-off between interaction-focused adaptation and broad linguistic generalization. These results highlight both the potential and the constraints of adapting human-inspired learning strategies to low-resource LMs, and point toward hybrid, curriculum-based approaches for enhancing generalization under ecological training limits.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising results on machine translation for high resource language pairs and domains. However, in specialised domains (e.g. medical) LLMs have shown lower performance compared to standard neural machine translation models. The consistency in the machine translation of terminology is crucial for users, researchers, and translators in specialised domains. In this study, we compare the performance between baseline LLMs and instruction-tuned LLMs in the medical domain. In addition, we introduce terminology from specialised medical dictionaries into the instruction formatted datasets for fine-tuning LLMs. The instruction-tuned LLMs significantly outperform the baseline models with automatic metrics.

Instruction tuning plays a crucial role in shaping the outputs of language models (LMs) to desired styles. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective method, Instruction Modelling (IM), which trains LMs by applying a loss function to the instruction and prompt part rather than solely to the output part. Through experiments across 21 diverse benchmarks, we show that, in many scenarios, IM can effectively improve the LM performance on both NLP tasks (e.g., MMLU, TruthfulQA, and HumanEval) and open-ended generation benchmarks (e.g., MT-Bench and AlpacaEval). Remarkably, in the most advantageous case, IM boosts model performance on AlpacaEval 1.0 by over 100%. We identify two key factors influencing the effectiveness of IM: (1) The ratio between instruction length and output length in the training data; and (2) The number of training examples. We observe that IM is especially beneficial when trained on datasets with lengthy instructions paired with brief outputs, or under the Superficial Alignment Hypothesis (SAH) where a small amount of training examples are used for instruction tuning. Further analysis substantiates our hypothesis that the improvement can be attributed to reduced overfitting to instruction tuning datasets. Our work provides practical guidance for instruction tuning LMs, especially in low-resource scenarios.

Instruction tuning has emerged as a key step in aligning large language models. One of the central challenges of instruction tuning is dataset selection, as the composition of the instruction tuning dataset can significantly impact downstream performance. In particular, researchers have hypothesized that dataset diversity and dataset quality are important indicators of downstream performance. However, it is not clear how to automatically select high quality and diverse data or how exactly quality and diversity affect instruction following ability. To resolve these issues, we propose a new algorithm, Quality-Diversity Instruction Tuning (QDIT). QDIT provides a principled algorithm to control dataset diversity and quality, allowing us to conduct an in depth study on the effect of diversity and quality on instruction tuning performance. From this study we draw two key insights (1) there is a natural tradeoff between dataset diversity and quality and (2) increasing dataset diversity significantly improves the worst case instruction following performance, therefore improving robustness. We validate the performance of QDIT on several large scale instruction tuning datasets, where we find it can improve worst case performance by 18% while maintaining or improving average performance compared to quality driven baselines.

Despite the remarkable success of LLMs in English, there is a significant gap in performance in non-English languages. In order to address this, we introduce a novel recipe for creating a multilingual synthetic instruction tuning dataset, sPhinX, which is created by selectively translating instruction response pairs from English into 50 languages. We test the effectiveness of sPhinX by using it to fine-tune two state-of-the-art models, Phi-3-small and Mistral-7B and then evaluating them across a comprehensive suite of multilingual benchmarks that test reasoning, question answering, and reading comprehension. Our results show that Phi-3-small and Mistral-7B fine-tuned with sPhinX perform better on an average by 4.2%pt and 5%pt respectively as compared to the baselines. We also devise a strategy to incorporate N-shot examples in each fine-tuning sample which further boosts the performance of these models by 3%pt and 10%pt respectively. Additionally, sPhinX also outperforms other multilingual instruction tuning datasets on the same benchmarks along with being sample efficient and diverse, thereby reducing dataset creation costs. Additionally, instruction tuning with sPhinX does not lead to regression on most standard LLM benchmarks.

Large language models have become a potential pathway toward achieving artificial general intelligence. Recent works on multi-modal large language models have demonstrated their effectiveness in handling visual modalities. In this work, we extend the research of MLLMs to point clouds and present the LAMM-Dataset and LAMM-Benchmark for 2D image and 3D point cloud understanding. We also establish an extensible framework to facilitate the extension of MLLMs to additional modalities. Our main contribution is three-fold: 1) We present the LAMM-Dataset and LAMM-Benchmark, which cover almost all high-level vision tasks for 2D and 3D vision. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our dataset and benchmark. 2) We demonstrate the detailed methods of constructing instruction-tuning datasets and benchmarks for MLLMs, which will enable future research on MLLMs to scale up and extend to other domains, tasks, and modalities faster. 3) We provide a primary but potential MLLM training framework optimized for modalities' extension. We also provide baseline models, comprehensive experimental observations, and analysis to accelerate future research. Codes and datasets are now available at https://github.com/OpenLAMM/LAMM.

Recent work has shown that fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on large-scale instruction-following datasets substantially improves their performance on a wide range of NLP tasks, especially in the zero-shot setting. However, even advanced instruction-tuned LLMs still fail to outperform small LMs on relation extraction (RE), a fundamental information extraction task. We hypothesize that instruction-tuning has been unable to elicit strong RE capabilities in LLMs due to RE's low incidence in instruction-tuning datasets, making up less than 1% of all tasks (Wang et al., 2022). To address this limitation, we propose QA4RE, a framework that aligns RE with question answering (QA), a predominant task in instruction-tuning datasets. Comprehensive zero-shot RE experiments over four datasets with two series of instruction-tuned LLMs (six LLMs in total) demonstrate that our QA4RE framework consistently improves LLM performance, strongly verifying our hypothesis and enabling LLMs to outperform strong zero-shot baselines by a large margin. Additionally, we provide thorough experiments and discussions to show the robustness, few-shot effectiveness, and strong transferability of our QA4RE framework. This work illustrates a promising way of adapting LLMs to challenging and underrepresented tasks by aligning these tasks with more common instruction-tuning tasks like QA.