title: Multitask Prompted Training Enables Zero-Shot Task Generalization
abstract: Large language models have recently been shown to attain reasonable zero-shot generalization on a diverse set of tasks (Brown et al., 2020). It has been hypothesized that this is a consequence of implicit multitask learning in language models’ pretraining (Radford et al., 2019). Can zero-shot generalization instead be directly induced by explicit multitask learning? To test this question at scale, we develop a system for easily mapping any natural language tasks into a human-readable prompted form. We convert a large set of supervised datasets, each with multiple prompts with diverse wording. These prompted datasets allow for benchmarking the ability of a model to perform completely unseen tasks specified in natural language. We fine-tune a pretrained encoder-decoder model (Raffel et al., 2020; Lester et al., 2021) on this multitask mixture covering a wide variety of tasks. The model attains strong zero-shot performance on several datasets, often outperforming models 16× its size. Further, our model attains strong performance on a subset of tasks from the BIG-Bench benchmark, outperforming models 6× its size. All trained models are available at https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/t-zero, and all prompts are available at https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/promptsource.
authors: Victor Sanh Albert Webson Colin Raffel Stephen Bach Lintang Sutawika Zaid Alyafeai Antoine Chaffin Arnaud Stiegler Arun Raja Manan Dey M Saiful Bari Canwen Xu Urmish Thakker Shanya Sharma Sharma Eliza Szczechla Taewoon Kim Gunjan Chhablani Nihal Nayak Debajyoti Datta Jonathan Chang Mike Tian-Jian Jiang Han Wang Matteo Manica Sheng Shen Zheng Xin Yong Harshit Pandey Rachel Bawden Thomas Wang Trishala Neeraj Jos Rozen Abheesht Sharma Andrea Santilli Thibault Fevry Jason Alan Fries Ryan Teehan Teven Le Scao Stella Biderman Leo Gao Thomas Wolf Alexander M Rush
hIndex: Alexander M Rush 43