---
license: apache-2.0
datasets:
- tiiuae/falcon-refinedweb
- instruction-pretrain/ft-instruction-synthesizer-collection
- instruction-pretrain/general-instruction-augmented-corpora
language:
- en
---
# Instruction Pre-Training: Language Models are Supervised Multitask Learners (EMNLP 2024)
This repo contains the **general models pre-trained from scratch** (on 100B tokens) in our paper [Instruction Pre-Training: Language Models are Supervised Multitask Learners](https://huggingface.co/papers/2406.14491).
We explore supervised multitask pre-training by proposing ***Instruction Pre-Training***, a framework that scalably augments massive raw corpora with instruction-response pairs to pre-train language models. The instruction-response pairs are generated by an efficient instruction synthesizer built on open-source models. In our experiments, we synthesize 200M instruction-response pairs covering 40+ task categories to verify the effectiveness of *Instruction Pre-Training*. Instruction Pre-Training* outperforms *Vanilla Pre-training* in both general pre-training from scratch and domain-adaptive continual pre-training. **In pre-training from scratch, *Instruction Pre-Training* not only improves pre-trained base models but also benefits more from further instruction tuning.** In continual pre-training, *Instruction Pre-Training* enables Llama3-8B to be comparable to or even outperform Llama3-70B.
**************************** **Updates** ****************************
* 2024/9/20: Our paper has been accepted by EMNLP 2024 main conference🎉
* 2024/9/11: Updated [FAQ on continual pre-training from Llama3](https://huggingface.co/instruction-pretrain/instruction-synthesizer)
* 2024/8/29: Updated [guidelines](https://huggingface.co/instruction-pretrain/medicine-Llama3-8B) on evaluating any 🤗Huggingface models on the domain-specific tasks
* 2024/7/31: Updated pre-training suggestions in the `Advanced Usage` section of [instruction-synthesizer](https://huggingface.co/instruction-pretrain/instruction-synthesizer)
* 2024/7/15: We scaled up the pre-trained tokens from 100B to 250B, with the number of synthesized instruction-response pairs reaching 500M. The performance trend on downstream tasks throughout the pre-training process:
* 2024/6/21: Released the [paper](https://huggingface.co/papers/2406.14491), [code](https://github.com/microsoft/LMOps), and [resources](https://huggingface.co/instruction-pretrain)
## Resources
**🤗 We share our data and models with example usages, feel free to open any discussions at [this page](https://huggingface.co/papers/2406.14491)! 🤗**
- Thanks to the demo [davanstrien/instruction-synthesizer](https://huggingface.co/spaces/davanstrien/instruction-synthesizer) for implementing our approach
- Context-Based Instruction Synthesizer: [instruction-synthesizer](https://huggingface.co/instruction-pretrain/instruction-synthesizer)
- Fine-Tuning Data for the Synthesizer: [ft-instruction-synthesizer-collection](https://huggingface.co/datasets/instruction-pretrain/ft-instruction-synthesizer-collection)
- General Models Pre-Trained from Scratch (on 100B tokes):
- [InstructLM-500M](https://huggingface.co/instruction-pretrain/InstructLM-500M)
- [InstructLM-1.3B](https://huggingface.co/instruction-pretrain/InstructLM-1.3B)
- Domain-Specific Models Pre-Trained from Llama3-8B:
- [Finance-Llama3-8B](https://huggingface.co/instruction-pretrain/finance-Llama3-8B)
- [Biomedicine-Llama3-8B](https://huggingface.co/instruction-pretrain/medicine-Llama3-8B)
- General Instruction-Augmented Corpora: [general-instruction-augmented-corpora](https://huggingface.co/datasets/instruction-pretrain/general-instruction-augmented-corpora)
- Domain-Specific Instruction-Augmented Corpora (no finance data to avoid ethical issues): [medicine-instruction-augmented-corpora](https://huggingface.co/datasets/instruction-pretrain/medicine-instruction-augmented-corpora)
## General Pre-Training From Scratch
We augment the [RefinedWeb corproa](https://huggingface.co/datasets/tiiuae/falcon-refinedweb) with instruction-response pairs generated by our [context-based instruction synthesizer](https://huggingface.co/instruction-pretrain/instruction-synthesizer) to pre-train general langauge models from scratch.
To evaluate our general base model using the [lm-evaluation-harness framework](https://github.com/EleutherAI/lm-evaluation-harness)
1. Setup dependencies:
```bash
git clone https://github.com/EleutherAI/lm-evaluation-harness
cd lm-evaluation-harness
pip install -e .
```
2. Evalaute:
```bash
MODEL=instruction-pretrain/InstructLM-500M
add_bos_token=True # this flag is needed because lm-eval-harness set add_bos_token to False by default, but ours require add_bos_token to be True
accelerate launch -m lm_eval --model hf \
--model_args pretrained=${MODEL},add_bos_token=${add_bos_token},dtype=float16 \
--gen_kwargs do_sample=False \
--tasks piqa,hellaswag,winogrande \
--batch_size auto \
--num_fewshot 0
accelerate launch -m lm_eval --model hf \
--model_args pretrained=${MODEL},add_bos_token=${add_bos_token},dtype=float16 \
--gen_kwargs do_sample=False \
--tasks social_iqa,ai2_arc,openbookqa,boolq,mmlu \
--batch_size auto \
--num_fewshot 5
```
## Citation
If you find our work helpful, please cite us:
[Instruction Pre-Training](https://huggingface.co/papers/2406.14491) (EMNLP 2024)
```bibtex
@article{cheng2024instruction,
title={Instruction Pre-Training: Language Models are Supervised Multitask Learners},
author={Cheng, Daixuan and Gu, Yuxian and Huang, Shaohan and Bi, Junyu and Huang, Minlie and Wei, Furu},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.14491},
year={2024}
}
```
[Adapt LLM to Domains](https://huggingface.co/papers/2309.09530)
```bibtex
@inproceedings{
cheng2024adapting,
title={Adapting Large Language Models via Reading Comprehension},
author={Daixuan Cheng and Shaohan Huang and Furu Wei},
booktitle={The Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations},
year={2024},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=y886UXPEZ0}
}
```