Question about prompting and System prompt in Vicuna format

#10
by houmie - opened

To get the best results it's recommended to use the same prompting as the model was trained to. I'm not sure which one it is. But the Model card is saying that Vicuna is recommended.

USER:
{prompt}
ASSISTANT:

However there is no example about how to use the System prompt in Vicuna format. May I ask you for an example please?
Thank you

There are so many instruction templates represented in these merges that you can get good results with several different formats. I think Vicuna produces the most creative results, but you would likely do well with Mistral's format too. The system prompt with Vicuna either has no tag or you can tag it with SYSTEM. I like adding newlines after the tags but the original format I believe does not include them.

My Vicuna preference
SYSTEM:
{system prompt}
USER:
{user input}
ASSISTANT:
{AI output}

Mistral
[INST] {prompt or user input} [/INST]
{AI output}
[INST] {next user prompt or input} [/INST]

I added EQ Bench results with Alpaca, ChatML, Mistral, Vicuna-v1.1 and Vicuna-v0 templates. Vicuna does seem to slightly edge out the other instruction templates: EQ Bench Results

But I feel like this model over all is just very flexible with how you approach it.

Thank you both for sharing this. I got Vicuna working now and am happy with it.

I agree that I had a similar experience with ChatML, even though it's my favourite due to its closing tags, I found that ChatML produced worse results with Miqu.

Thanks, Dracones. I appreciate the documentation of your results.

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