Language models are weak learners
A central notion in practical and theoretical machine learning is that of a
weak learner, classifiers that achieve better-than-random
performance (on any given distribution over data), even by a small margin. Such
weak learners form the practical basis for canonical machine learning methods
such as boosting. In this work, we illustrate that prompt-based large language
models can operate effectively as said weak learners. Specifically, we
illustrate the use of a large language model (LLM) as a weak learner in a
boosting algorithm applied to tabular data. We show that by providing (properly
sampled according to the distribution of interest) text descriptions of tabular
data samples, LLMs can produce a summary of the samples that serves as a
template for classification and achieves the aim of acting as a weak learner on
this task. We incorporate these models into a boosting approach, which in some
settings can leverage the knowledge within the LLM to outperform traditional
tree-based boosting. The model outperforms both few-shot learning and
occasionally even more involved fine-tuning procedures, particularly for tasks
involving small numbers of data points. The results illustrate the potential
for prompt-based LLMs to function not just as few-shot learners themselves, but
as components of larger machine learning pipelines.
649a48b5478082a13ece75c5
Hariharan Manikandan
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2023-06-29T07:30:55.364Z
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Hariharan Manikandan
user
vshshv3
649a48b5478082a13ece75c6
Yiding Jiang
649a48b5478082a13ece75c7
J Zico Kolter
Language models are weak learners
A central notion in practical and theoretical machine learning is that of a
weak learner, classifiers that achieve better-than-random
performance (on any given distribution over data), even by a small margin. Such
weak learners form the practical basis for canonical machine learning methods
such as boosting. In this work, we illustrate that prompt-based large language
models can operate effectively as said weak learners. Specifically, we
illustrate the use of a large language model (LLM) as a weak learner in a
boosting algorithm applied to tabular data. We show that by providing (properly
sampled according to the distribution of interest) text descriptions of tabular
data samples, LLMs can produce a summary of the samples that serves as a
template for classification and achieves the aim of acting as a weak learner on
this task. We incorporate these models into a boosting approach, which in some
settings can leverage the knowledge within the LLM to outperform traditional
tree-based boosting. The model outperforms both few-shot learning and
occasionally even more involved fine-tuning procedures, particularly for tasks
involving small numbers of data points. The results illustrate the potential
for prompt-based LLMs to function not just as few-shot learners themselves, but
as components of larger machine learning pipelines.
Prompt-based large language models can effectively serve as weak learners in boosting algorithms, enhancing performance on tabular data with limited samples compared to traditional methods.
weak learner boosting large language models LLM tabular data few-shot learning fine-tuning classification