Instruction tuning is a burgeoning method to elicit the general intelligence of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the creation of instruction data is still largely heuristic, leading to significant variation in quality and distribution across existing datasets. Experimental conclusions drawn from these datasets are also inconsistent, with some studies emphasizing the importance of scaling instruction numbers, while others argue that a limited number of samples suffice. To better understand data construction guidelines, we deepen our focus from the overall model performance to the growth of each underlying ability, such as creative writing, code generation, and logical reasoning. We systematically investigate the effects of data volume, parameter size, and data construction methods on the development of various abilities, using hundreds of model checkpoints (7b to 33b) fully instruction-tuned on a new collection of over 40k human-curated instruction data. This proposed dataset is stringently quality-controlled and categorized into ten distinct LLM abilities. Our study reveals three primary findings: (i) Despite data volume and parameter scale directly impacting models' overall performance, some abilities are more responsive to their increases and can be effectively trained using limited data, while some are highly resistant to these changes. (ii) Human-curated data strongly outperforms synthetic data from GPT-4 in efficiency and can constantly enhance model performance with volume increases, but is unachievable with synthetic data. (iii) Instruction data brings powerful cross-ability generalization, with evaluation results on out-of-domain data mirroring the first two observations. Furthermore, we demonstrate how these findings can guide more efficient data constructions, leading to practical performance improvements on public benchmarks.

基于全面的模型性能至诚态度，我们系统调查了数据量、参数规模和数据构建方法对各种能力发展的影响，并通过新的40k人工指导的指令数据集进行了数百个模型检查点（7b到33b）的全面指导优化。我们的研究揭示了三个主要发现：（i）尽管数据量和参数规模直接影响模型的整体性能，但某些能力更容易受到其增加的影响，并且可以通过有限数据进行有效训练，而某些能力对这些变化高度抵抗。（ii）人工指导的数据在效率上明显优于GPT-4的合成数据，并且可以随着数据量增加不断提高模型性能，而合成数据则无法达到这种效果。（iii）指令数据带来了强大的跨能力泛化性，域外数据的评估结果反映了前两个观察结果。此外，我们还展示了这些发现如何指导更高效的数据构建，从而在公共基准测试中实现实际性能的提升。

指导调优的动力学：大型语言模型中的每个能力都有自己的增长速度