Multitask Prompted Training Enables Zero-shot Task Generalization (Explained)

Can zero-shot generalization instead be directly induced by explicit multitask learning? Watch the video to find out!

0:00 - Intro 2:14 - Prompted training format 5:52 - Measuring generalization to unseen tasks 8:45 - Held-out tasks 10:45 - The future of NLP 11:48 - Model 12:17 - Experiment results

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Paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.08207

Code https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/promptsource/

Abstract Large language models have recently been shown to attain reasonable zero-shot generalization on a diverse set of tasks. It has been hypothesized that this is a consequence of implicit multitask learning in language model training. 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 general natural language tasks into a human-readable prompted form. We convert a large set of supervised datasets, each with multiple prompts using varying natural language. 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 on this multitask mixture covering a wide variety of tasks. The model attains strong zero-shot performance on several standard datasets, often outperforming models 16x its size. Further, our approach attains strong performance on a subset of tasks from the BIG-Bench benchmark, outperforming models 6x its size. ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YToXXfrIu6w