Self-Tuning: Instructing LLMs to Effectively Acquire New Knowledge through Self-Teaching
This addresses the issue of keeping LLMs current for users needing accurate, recent information, though it is incremental as it builds on existing self-supervised learning approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of large language models (LLMs) struggling with up-to-date information by introducing Self-Tuning, a framework that uses self-teaching to improve knowledge acquisition from new documents, resulting in superior performance across tasks and better preservation of previous knowledge, as shown in experiments with models like Llama2-7B.
Large language models (LLMs) often struggle to provide up-to-date information due to their one-time training and the constantly evolving nature of the world. To keep LLMs current, existing approaches typically involve continued pre-training on new documents. However, they frequently face difficulties in extracting stored knowledge. Motivated by the remarkable success of the Feynman Technique in efficient human learning, we introduce Self-Tuning, a learning framework aimed at improving an LLM's ability to effectively acquire new knowledge from unseen raw documents through self-teaching. Specifically, we develop a Self-Teaching strategy that augments the documents with a set of knowledge-intensive tasks created in a self-supervised manner, focusing on three crucial aspects: memorization, comprehension, and self-reflection. Additionally, we introduce three Wiki-Newpages-2023-QA datasets to facilitate an in-depth analysis of an LLM's knowledge acquisition ability concerning memorization, extraction, and reasoning. Extensive experimental results on various models, e.g., Llama2-7B reveal that Self-Tuning consistently exhibits superior performance across all knowledge acquisition tasks and excels in preserving previous knowledge.