Large Language Model as Attributed Training Data Generator: A Tale of Diversity and Bias
This addresses data generation challenges for NLP practitioners by offering a more efficient and less biased method, though it is incremental as it builds on existing LLM-based generation approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of limited diversity and systematic bias in training data generated by large language models using simple class-conditional prompts, and finds that using diversely attributed prompts improves model performance, reduces bias, and cuts querying costs by 95%.
Large language models (LLMs) have been recently leveraged as training data generators for various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. While previous research has explored different approaches to training models using generated data, they generally rely on simple class-conditional prompts, which may limit the diversity of the generated data and inherit systematic biases of LLM. Thus, we investigate training data generation with diversely attributed prompts (e.g., specifying attributes like length and style), which have the potential to yield diverse and attributed generated data. Our investigation focuses on datasets with high cardinality and diverse domains, wherein we demonstrate that attributed prompts outperform simple class-conditional prompts in terms of the resulting model's performance. Additionally, we present a comprehensive empirical study on data generation encompassing vital aspects like bias, diversity, and efficiency, and highlight three key observations: firstly, synthetic datasets generated by simple prompts exhibit significant biases, such as regional bias; secondly, attribute diversity plays a pivotal role in enhancing model performance; lastly, attributed prompts achieve the performance of simple class-conditional prompts while utilizing only 5\% of the querying cost of ChatGPT associated with the latter. The data and code are available on \url{https://github.com/yueyu1030/AttrPrompt}.