LLMMarch 13, 2023Stanford University

Alpaca: A Strong, Replicable Instruction-Following Model

Rohan Taori, Ishaan Gulrajani, Tianyi Zhang, Yann Dubois, Xuechen Li, Carlos Guestrin, Percy Liang, Tatsunori B. Hashimoto

Abstract

We demonstrate that fine-tuning Meta's LLaMA 7B model on 52K instruction-following demonstrations generated by GPT-3.5 produces a model that behaves qualitatively similarly to OpenAI's text-davinci-003. Alpaca costs less than $600 to reproduce, making it an accessible starting point for the research community to study instruction-following models.

Key Findings

  • 1Fine-tuned LLaMA 7B on 52K instruction-following examples for under $600
  • 2Produced a model qualitatively similar to text-davinci-003
  • 3Demonstrated that instruction tuning with synthetic data is highly effective
  • 4Released training code, data, and model for research community
  • 5Showed the viability of low-cost instruction-tuned model creation

Impact & Significance

Alpaca sparked the open-source instruction-tuning revolution, showing that high-quality chatbots could be created cheaply. It led to dozens of follow-up projects (Vicuna, Koala, GPT4All) and democratized LLM fine-tuning research.

Related Tools

Read Full Paper