# Sample Design Engineering: An Empirical Study of What Makes Good Downstream Fine-Tuning Samples for LLMs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.13033 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13033/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [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)
- [The Flan Collection: Designing Data and Methods for Effective Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13688/) (2023)
- [Cross-Task Generalization via Natural Language Crowdsourcing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08773/) (2021)
- [Baichuan 2: Open Large-scale Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10305/) (2023)
- [How Close is ChatGPT to Human Experts? Comparison Corpus, Evaluation, and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07597/) (2023)
- [Efficient and Effective Text Encoding for Chinese LLaMA and Alpaca](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08177/) (2023)
- [ChatIE: Zero-Shot Information Extraction via Chatting with ChatGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10205/) (2023)
- [Demystifying Prompts in Language Models via Perplexity Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04037/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models Understand and Can be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11760/) (2023)
- [Metrics for Multi-Class Classification: an Overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05756/) (2020)
- [The CoT Collection: Improving Zero-shot and Few-shot Learning of Language Models via Chain-of-Thought Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14045/) (2023)
- [MAVEN: A Massive General Domain Event Detection Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13590/) (2020)
- [An Empirical Study on Information Extraction using Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14450/) (2023)
- [Mind the instructions: a holistic evaluation of consistency and interactions in prompt-based learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13486/) (2023)
- [GENIUS: Sketch-based Language Model Pre-training via Extreme and Selective Masking for Text Generation and Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10330/) (2022)

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

- [Label Alignment and Reassignment with Generalist Large Language Model for Enhanced Cross-Domain Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17344/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In the burgeoning field of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and LLaMA, Prompt Engineering (PE) is renowned for boosting zero-shot or in-context learning (ICL) through prompt modifications. Yet, the realm of the sample design for downstream fine-tuning, crucial for task-specific LLM adaptation, is largely unexplored. This paper introduces Sample Design Engineering (SDE), a methodical approach to enhancing LLMs' post-tuning performance by refining input, output, and reasoning designs. We conduct a series of in-domain (ID) and out-of-domain (OOD) experiments to assess the impact of various design options on LLMs' downstream performance, revealing several intriguing patterns that hold consistently across different LLMs. Based on these insights, we propose an integrated SDE strategy, combining the most effective options, and validate its consistent superiority over heuristic sample designs in complex downstream tasks like multi-aspect sentiment analysis, event extraction, and nested entity recognition. Additionally, analyses of LLMs' inherent prompt/output perplexity, zero-shot, and ICL abilities illustrate that good PE strategies may not always translate to good SDE strategies. Code available at https://github.com/beyondguo/LLM-Tuning.