Tuna: Instruction Tuning using Feedback from Large Language Models
Authors: name: Haoran Li, name: Yiran Liu, name: Xingxing Zhang, name: Wei Lu, name: Furu Wei

Instruction tuning of open-source large language models (LLMs) like LLaMA,
using direct outputs from more powerful LLMs such as Instruct-GPT and GPT-4,
has proven to be a cost-effective way to align model behaviors with human
preferences. However, the instruction-tuned model has only seen one response
per instruction, lacking the knowledge of potentially better responses. In this
paper, we propose finetuning an instruction-tuned LLM using our novel
probabilistic ranking and contextual ranking approaches to
increase the likelihood of generating better responses. Probabilistic ranking
enables the instruction-tuned model to inherit the relative rankings of
high-quality and low-quality responses from the teacher LLM. On the other hand,
learning with contextual ranking allows the model to refine its own response
distribution using the contextual understanding ability of stronger LLMs.
Furthermore, we apply probabilistic ranking and contextual ranking sequentially
to the instruction-tuned LLM. The resulting model, which we call Tuna,
consistently improves the performance on Super Natural Instructions (119 test
tasks), LMentry (25 test tasks), Vicuna QA, and can even obtain better results
than several strong reinforcement learning baselines. Our code and data are
available at  https://github.com/microsoft/LMOps.