# Efficacy of Machine-Generated Instructions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.14423 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14423/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 13 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [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)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10560/) (2022)
- [Multitask Prompted Training Enables Zero-Shot Task Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08207/) (2021)
- [Super-NaturalInstructions: Generalization via Declarative Instructions on 1600+ NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07705/) (2022)
- [Cross-Task Generalization via Natural Language Crowdsourcing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08773/) (2021)
- [InstructABSA: Instruction Learning for Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08624/) (2023)
- [Instruction Tuned Models are Quick Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05539/) (2023)
- [TarGEN: Targeted Data Generation with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17876/) (2023)
- [Context-NER : Contextual Phrase Generation at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08079/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large "instruction-tuned" language models (i.e., 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 often limited in quantity, diversity, and creativity, therefore hindering the generality of the tuned model. We conducted a quantitative study to figure out the efficacy of machine-generated annotations, where we compare the results of a fine-tuned BERT model with human v/s machine-generated annotations. Applying our methods to the vanilla GPT-3 model, we saw that machine generated annotations were 78.54% correct and the fine-tuned model achieved a 96.01% model performance compared to the performance with human-labelled annotations. This result shows that machine-generated annotations are a resource and cost effective way to fine-tune down-stream models.