# Towards Better Instruction Following Language Models for Chinese: Investigating the Impact of Training Data and Evaluation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.07854 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07854/

## Key facts

- Cited by 20 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [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)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08073/) (2022)
- [Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15556/) (2022)
- [XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08237/) (2019)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [Learning to summarize from human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.01325/) (2020)
- [Fine-Tuning Language Models from Human Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08593/) (2019)
- [Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04615/) (2022)
- [SentencePiece: A simple and language independent subword tokenizer and detokenizer for Neural Text Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06226/) (2018)
- [BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05100/) (2022)
- [Challenging BIG-Bench Tasks and Whether Chain-of-Thought Can Solve Them](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09261/) (2022)
- [WebGPT: Browser-assisted question-answering with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09332/) (2021)
- [Multitask Prompted Training Enables Zero-Shot Task Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08207/) (2021)
- [A General Language Assistant as a Laboratory for Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00861/) (2021)
- [A Multitask, Multilingual, Multimodal Evaluation of ChatGPT on Reasoning, Hallucination, and Interactivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04023/) (2023)
- [Super-NaturalInstructions: Generalization via Declarative Instructions on 1600+ NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07705/) (2022)
- [GLM-130B: An Open Bilingual Pre-trained Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02414/) (2022)
- [Red Teaming Language Models to Reduce Harms: Methods, Scaling Behaviors, and Lessons Learned](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07858/) (2022)
- [GPT-NeoX-20B: An Open-Source Autoregressive Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06745/) (2022)
- [Cross-Task Generalization via Natural Language Crowdsourcing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08773/) (2021)
- [Instruction Tuning with GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03277/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- ["It's a Fair Game", or Is It? Examining How Users Navigate Disclosure Risks and Benefits When Using LLM-Based Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11653/) (2023)
- [OmniFlatten: An End-to-end GPT Model for Seamless Voice Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17799/) (2024)
- [Xiezhi: An Ever-Updating Benchmark for Holistic Domain Knowledge Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05783/) (2023)
- [Towards the Law of Capacity Gap in Distilling Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07052/) (2023)
- [Flames: Benchmarking Value Alignment of LLMs in Chinese](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06899/) (2023)
- [Aligning Large Language Models with Human: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12966/) (2023)
- [CharPoet: A Chinese Classical Poetry Generation System Based on Token-free LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03512/) (2024)
- [How Vocabulary Sharing Facilitates Multilingualism in LLaMA?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09071/) (2023)
- [One Tokenizer To Rule Them All: Emergent Language Plasticity via Multilingual Tokenizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10766/) (2025)
- [FLM-Audio: Natural Monologues Improves Native Full-Duplex Chatbots via Dual Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02521/) (2025)
- [The Multilingual Divide and Its Impact on Global AI Safety](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21344/) (2025)
- [YUAN 2.0: A Large Language Model with Localized Filtering-based Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15786/) (2023)
- [Learning When to Retrieve, What to Rewrite, and How to Respond in Conversational QA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15515/) (2024)
- [SoTaNa: The Open-Source Software Development Assistant](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13416/) (2023)
- [Inductive-Deductive Strategy Reuse for Multi-Turn Instructional Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11095/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Role-playing Systems through Aggressive Queries: Evaluation and Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10618/) (2024)
- [KwaiYiiMath: Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07488/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models Understand Layout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05750/) (2024)
- [Extending LLMs to New Languages: A Case Study of Llama and Persian Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13375/) (2024)
- [COMPASS: COntinual Multilingual PEFT with Adaptive Semantic Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.20720/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.