Few-shot Adaptation Works with UnpredicTable Data
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Prior work on language models (LMs) shows that training on a large number of diverse tasks improves few-shot learning (FSL) performance on new tasks.We take this to the extreme, automatically extracting 413,299 tasks from internet tables -orders of magnitude more than the next-largest public datasets.Finetuning on the resulting dataset leads to improved FSL performance on Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, but not proportionally to dataset scale.In fact, we find that narrow subsets of our dataset sometimes outperform more diverse datasets.For example, finetuning on software documentation from support.google.com raises FSL performance by a mean of +7.5% on 52 downstream tasks, which beats training on 40 humancurated NLP datasets (+6.7%).Finetuning on various narrow datasets leads to similar broad improvements across test tasks, suggesting that the gains are not from domain adaptation but adapting to FSL in general.We do not observe clear patterns between the datasets that lead to FSL gains, leaving open questions about why certain data helps with FSL.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".