# Platypus: Quick, Cheap, and Powerful Refinement of LLMs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.07317 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07317/

## Key facts

- Cited by 150 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [Measuring Mathematical Problem Solving With the MATH Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03874/) (2021)
- [Let's Verify Step by Step](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.20050/) (2023)
- [Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.06538/) (2017)
- [QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14314/) (2023)
- [Switch Transformers: Scaling to Trillion Parameter Models with Simple and Efficient Sparsity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03961/) (2021)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10560/) (2022)
- [Can a Suit of Armor Conduct Electricity? A New Dataset for Open Book Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02789/) (2018)
- [Learn to Explain: Multimodal Reasoning via Thought Chains for Science Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09513/) (2022)
- [Solving Quantitative Reasoning Problems with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.14858/) (2022)
- [WizardLM: Empowering large pre-trained language models to follow complex instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12244/) (2023)
- [LIMA: Less Is More for Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11206/) (2023)
- [Towards a Unified View of Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04366/) (2021)
- [Crowdsourcing Multiple Choice Science Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06209/) (2017)
- [Distilling Step-by-Step! Outperforming Larger Language Models with Less Training Data and Smaller Model Sizes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02301/) (2023)
- [WizardCoder: Empowering Code Large Language Models with Evol-Instruct](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08568/) (2023)
- [Deduplicating Training Data Makes Language Models Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06499/) (2021)
- [Is ChatGPT a General-Purpose Natural Language Processing Task Solver?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06476/) (2023)
- [Towards Expert-Level Medical Question Answering with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09617/) (2023)
- [Orca: Progressive Learning from Complex Explanation Traces of GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02707/) (2023)
- [Expert Gate: Lifelong Learning with a Network of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.06194/) (2016)
- [SciBench: Evaluating College-Level Scientific Problem-Solving Abilities of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10635/) (2023)
- [ReClor: A Reading Comprehension Dataset Requiring Logical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.04326/) (2020)
- [TheoremQA: A Theorem-driven Question Answering dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12524/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 150)

- [MetaMath: Bootstrap Your Own Mathematical Questions for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12284/) (2023)
- [Siren's Song in the AI Ocean: A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01219/) (2023)
- [InjecAgent: Benchmarking Indirect Prompt Injections in Tool-Integrated Large Language Model Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02691/) (2024)
- [MAmmoTH: Building Math Generalist Models through Hybrid Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05653/) (2023)
- [ToRA: A Tool-Integrated Reasoning Agent for Mathematical Problem Solving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17452/) (2023)
- [The Unlocking Spell on Base LLMs: Rethinking Alignment via In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01552/) (2023)
- [The Unreasonable Ineffectiveness of the Deeper Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17887/) (2024)
- [Programming Refusal with Conditional Activation Steering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05907/) (2024)
- [Benchmark Data Contamination of Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04244/) (2024)
- [Nemotron-4 340B Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11704/) (2024)
- [Granite Code Models: A Family of Open Foundation Models for Code Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04324/) (2024)
- [Knowledge Fusion of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10491/) (2024)
- [SeaLLMs -- Large Language Models for Southeast Asia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00738/) (2023)
- [GLoRe: When, Where, and How to Improve LLM Reasoning via Global and Local Refinements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10963/) (2024)
- [NEFTune: Noisy Embeddings Improve Instruction Finetuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05914/) (2023)
- [MobileNetV4 -- Universal Models for the Mobile Ecosystem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10518/) (2024)
- [Revisiting Catastrophic Forgetting in Large Language Model Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04836/) (2024)
- [Follow My Instruction and Spill the Beans: Scalable Data Extraction from Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17840/) (2024)
- [Hidden Persuaders: LLMs' Political Leaning and Their Influence on Voters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.24190/) (2024)
- [Guiding Language Model Reasoning with Planning Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05707/) (2023)
- [Key-Point-Driven Data Synthesis with its Enhancement on Mathematical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02333/) (2024)
- [AgentBank: Towards Generalized LLM Agents via Fine-Tuning on 50000+ Interaction Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07706/) (2024)
- [RoSA: Accurate Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning via Robust Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04679/) (2024)
- [HAE-RAE Bench: Evaluation of Korean Knowledge in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.02706/) (2023)
- [eCeLLM: Generalizing Large Language Models for E-commerce from Large-scale, High-quality Instruction Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08831/) (2024)
- [MuggleMath: Assessing the Impact of Query and Response Augmentation on Math Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05506/) (2023)
- [Dualformer: Controllable Fast and Slow Thinking by Learning with Randomized Reasoning Traces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09918/) (2024)
- [Auto-Arena: Automating LLM Evaluations with Agent Peer Battles and Committee Discussions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20267/) (2024)
- [E4SRec: An Elegant Effective Efficient Extensible Solution of Large Language Models for Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02443/) (2023)
- [Recent Advances in Large Langauge Model Benchmarks against Data Contamination: From Static to Dynamic Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17521/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present Platypus, a family of fine-tuned and merged Large Language Models (LLMs) that achieves the strongest performance and currently stands at first place in HuggingFace's Open LLM Leaderboard as of the release date of this work. In this work we describe (1) our curated dataset Open-Platypus, that is a subset of other open datasets and which textitwe release to the public (2) our process of fine-tuning and merging LoRA modules in order to conserve the strong prior of pretrained LLMs, while bringing specific domain knowledge to the surface (3) our efforts in checking for test data leaks and contamination in the training data, which can inform future research. Specifically, the Platypus family achieves strong performance in quantitative LLM metrics across model sizes, topping the global Open LLM leaderboard while using just a fraction of the fine-tuning data and overall compute that are required for other state-of-the-art fine-tuned LLMs. In particular, a 13B Platypus model can be trained on textita single A100 GPU using 25k questions in 5 hours. This is a testament of the quality of our Open-Platypus dataset, and opens opportunities for more improvements in the field. Project page: https://platypus-llm.github.io