Adapting Large Language Models via Reading Comprehension
We explore how continued pre-training on domain-specific corpora influences
large language models, revealing that training on the raw corpora endows the
model with domain knowledge, but drastically hurts its prompting ability for
question answering. Taken inspiration from human learning via reading
comprehension--practice after reading improves the ability to answer questions
based on the learned knowledge--we propose a simple method for transforming raw
corpora into reading comprehension texts. Each raw text is enriched with a
series of tasks related to its content. Our method, highly scalable and
applicable to any pre-training corpora, consistently enhances performance
across various tasks in three different domains: biomedicine, finance, and law.
Notably, our 7B language model achieves competitive performance with
domain-specific models of much larger scales, such as BloombergGPT-50B.
Furthermore, we demonstrate that domain-specific reading comprehension texts
can improve the model's performance even on general benchmarks, showing the
potential to develop a general model across even more domains. Our model, code,
and data will be available at https://github.com/microsoft/LMOps.
650912707e0d56c27157af44
Daixuan Cheng
claimed_verified
2023-09-19T15:54:06.813Z
649e6761f9134a06ed1e0cea
https://cdn-avatars.huggingface.co/v1/production/uploads/649e6761f9134a06ed1e0cea/XNeKceE8xSwI0xWwWUwwJ.jpeg
Daixuan Cheng
user
daixuancheng
650912707e0d56c27157af45
Shaohan Huang
claimed_verified
2025-08-28T09:00:37.145Z
632bd2f72d6a805eeb4bc601
/avatars/6e1533e8a599f3068290aa69ac82cab7.svg
HUANG SHAOHAN
user
buaahsh
650912707e0d56c27157af46
Furu Wei
admin_assigned
2023-09-20T13:13:58.991Z
6368c512fbfe97c16a40baba
/avatars/1c23bc7c0b6d9225699ce27647623d7a.svg
Furu Wei
user
thegenerality
Adapting Large Language Models via Reading Comprehension
We explore how continued pre-training on domain-specific corpora influences
large language models, revealing that training on the raw corpora endows the
model with domain knowledge, but drastically hurts its prompting ability for
question answering. Taken inspiration from human learning via reading
comprehension--practice after reading improves the ability to answer questions
based on the learned knowledge--we propose a simple method for transforming raw
corpora into reading comprehension texts. Each raw text is enriched with a
series of tasks related to its content. Our method, highly scalable and
applicable to any pre-training corpora, consistently enhances performance
across various tasks in three different domains: biomedicine, finance, and law.
Notably, our 7B language model achieves competitive performance with
domain-specific models of much larger scales, such as BloombergGPT-50B.
Furthermore, we demonstrate that domain-specific reading comprehension texts
can improve the model's performance even on general benchmarks, showing the
potential to develop a general model across even more domains. Our model, code,
and data will be available at https://github.com/microsoft/LMOps.
Transforming raw corpora into reading comprehension texts enhances large language models' question-answering abilities across various domains and improves performance on general benchmarks.
large language models pre-training domain-specific corpora domain knowledge prompting ability reading comprehension scalable general benchmarks