# Go-tuning: Improving Zero-shot Learning Abilities of Smaller Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.10461 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10461/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Dec 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [Language Models as Knowledge Bases?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01066/) (2019)
- [Calibrate Before Use: Improving Few-Shot Performance of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09690/) (2021)
- [LaMDA: Language Models for Dialog Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08239/) (2022)
- [GLaM: Efficient Scaling of Language Models with Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06905/) (2021)
- [Large Language Models Can Self-Improve](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11610/) (2022)
- [CLUE: A Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05986/) (2020)
- [Corpus Creation for Sentiment Analysis in Code-Mixed Tamil-English Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.00206/) (2020)
- [RussianSuperGLUE: A Russian Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.15925/) (2020)
- [Toxic Language Detection in Social Media for Brazilian Portuguese: New Dataset and Multilingual Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04543/) (2020)
- [The birth of Romanian BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.08712/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Seeking Information with RAG-Assistants: Does Model Size Matter in Human-AI Collaborations?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.00964/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With increasing scale, large language models demonstrate both quantitative improvement and new qualitative capabilities, especially as zero-shot learners, like GPT-3. However, these results rely heavily on delicate prompt design and large computation. In this work, we explore whether the strong zero-shot ability could be achieved at a smaller model scale without any external supervised data. To achieve this goal, we revisit masked language modeling and present a geometry-guided self-supervised learning method (Go-tuningfor short) by taking a small number of task-aware self-supervised data to update language models further. Experiments show that Go-tuning can enable T5-small (80M) competitive zero-shot results compared with large language models, such as T5-XL (3B). We also apply Go-tuning on multi-task settings and develop a multi-task model, mgo-T5 (250M). It can reach the average performance of OPT (175B) on 9 datasets.