CRAFT Your Dataset: Task-Specific Synthetic Dataset Generation Through Corpus Retrieval and Augmentation

2024-09-03

arXiv.org

AI Summary

Addressing the challenge of constructing high-quality, domain-specific annotated data—often costly and labor-intensive—this paper proposes a few-shot-driven synthetic data generation paradigm. Given only a small set of user-provided examples, the method retrieves semantically relevant real-world text from large-scale web corpora and leverages instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) to automatically generate well-formatted, task-specific synthetic training data. It is the first approach to synergistically integrate corpus retrieval with LLM-based augmentation, enabling zero human annotation, domain adaptability, and efficient few-shot generalization. Empirical evaluation across biomedical, medical, and commonsense question answering (QA), as well as summarization tasks, demonstrates that models trained on the generated data achieve a 46-point preference score improvement over human-annotated baselines in summarization, while QA models match or surpass the performance of general-purpose foundation models.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Code Generation / Program Synthesis from Natural Language
• Machine Learning: Large Multimodal Models (LMMs)
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Conversational Systems for Recommendation & Retrieval

Application Category

• Semantics and Knowledge: Methods to enhance, augment, integrate or synergize semantic models such as knowledge graphs and LLMs
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Large language models for search
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Humans versus LLMs for data annotation and labeling

Abstract

Building high-quality datasets for specialized tasks is a time-consuming and resource-intensive process that often requires specialized domain knowledge. We propose Corpus Retrieval and Augmentation for Fine-Tuning (CRAFT), a method for generating synthetic datasets, given a small number of user-written few-shots that demonstrate the task to be performed. Given the few-shot examples, we use large-scale public web-crawled corpora and similarity-based document retrieval to find other relevant human-written documents. Lastly, instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) augment the retrieved documents into custom-formatted task samples, which then can be used for fine-tuning. We demonstrate that CRAFT can efficiently generate large-scale task-specific training datasets for four diverse tasks: biology question-answering (QA), medicine QA and commonsense QA as well as summarization. Our experiments show that CRAFT-based models outperform or achieve comparable performance to general LLMs for QA tasks, while CRAFT-based summarization models outperform models trained on human-curated data by 46 preference points.

Problem

• Generates synthetic datasets for specialized tasks efficiently
• Uses corpus retrieval and LLM augmentation for customization
• Outperforms human-curated and other synthetic data methods

Innovation

• Retrieves documents using similarity-based corpus retrieval
• Augments data with instruction-tuned LLMs
• Generates custom-formatted synthetic task samples