Does Instruction Tuning Make LLMs More Consistent?

Abstract

The purpose of instruction tuning is enabling zero-shot performance, but instruction tuning has also been shown to improve chain-of-thought reasoning and value alignment (Si et al., 2023). Here we consider the impact on consistency, i.e., the sensitivity of language models to small perturbations in the input. We compare 10 instruction-tuned LLaMA models to the original LLaMA-7b model and show that almost across-the-board they become more consistent, both in terms of their representations and their predictions in zero-shot and downstream tasks. We explain these improvements through mechanistic analyses of factual recall.

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