{"id":883905,"date":"2022-10-06T22:57:04","date_gmt":"2022-10-07T05:57:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/"},"modified":"2024-01-22T12:07:41","modified_gmt":"2024-01-22T20:07:41","slug":"explaining-patterns-in-data-with-language-models-via-interpretable-autoprompting","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/explaining-patterns-in-data-with-language-models-via-interpretable-autoprompting\/","title":{"rendered":"Explaining Patterns in Data with Language Models via Interpretable Autoprompting"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote class=\"abstract mathjax\"><p>Large language models (LLMs) have displayed an impressive ability to harness natural language to perform complex tasks. In this work, we explore whether we can leverage this learned ability to find and explain patterns in data. Specifically, given a pre-trained LLM and data examples, we introduce interpretable autoprompting (iPrompt), an algorithm that generates a natural-language string explaining the data. iPrompt iteratively alternates between generating explanations with an LLM and reranking them based on their performance when used as a prompt. Experiments on a wide range of datasets, from synthetic mathematics to natural-language understanding, show that iPrompt can yield meaningful insights by accurately finding groundtruth dataset descriptions. Moreover, the prompts produced by iPrompt are simultaneously human-interpretable and highly effective for generalization: on real-world sentiment classification datasets, iPrompt produces prompts that match or even improve upon human-written prompts for GPT-3. Finally, experiments with an fMRI dataset show the potential for iPrompt to aid in scientific discovery. All code for using the methods and data here is made available on <a class=\"msr-external-link glyph-append glyph-append-open-in-new-tab glyph-append-xsmall\" href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/csinva\/interpretable-autoprompting\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Github<span class=\"sr-only\"> (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote><p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-883908 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/Screen-Shot-2022-10-06-at-10.48.56-PM-300x106.png\" alt=\"iPrompt overview\" width=\"741\" height=\"262\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/Screen-Shot-2022-10-06-at-10.48.56-PM-300x106.png 300w, https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/Screen-Shot-2022-10-06-at-10.48.56-PM-1024x363.png 1024w, https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/Screen-Shot-2022-10-06-at-10.48.56-PM-768x272.png 768w, https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/Screen-Shot-2022-10-06-at-10.48.56-PM-1536x544.png 1536w, https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/Screen-Shot-2022-10-06-at-10.48.56-PM-240x85.png 240w, https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/Screen-Shot-2022-10-06-at-10.48.56-PM.png 1638w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 741px) 100vw, 741px\" \/><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Large language models (LLMs) have displayed an impressive ability to harness natural language to perform complex tasks. In this work, we explore whether we can leverage this learned ability to find and explain patterns in data. Specifically, given a pre-trained LLM and data examples, we introduce interpretable autoprompting (iPrompt), an algorithm that generates a natural-language [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr-author-ordering":[{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Chandan Singh","user_id":"42126"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Jyoti Aneja","user_id":"41338"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Jianfeng Gao","user_id":"32246"}],"msr_publishername":"","msr_publisher_other":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_edition":"","msr_editors":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_issue":"","msr_journal":"","msr_number":"","msr_organization":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_page_range_start":"","msr_page_range_end":"","msr_series":"","msr_volume":"","msr_copyright":"","msr_conference_name":"","msr_doi":"","msr_arxiv_id":"","msr_s2_paper_id":"","msr_mag_id":"","msr_pubmed_id":"","msr_other_authors":"","msr_other_contributors":"","msr_speaker":"","msr_award":"","msr_affiliation":"","msr_institution":"","msr_host":"","msr_version":"","msr_duration":"","msr_original_fields_of_study":"","msr_release_tracker_id":"","msr_s2_match_type":"","msr_citation_count_updated":"","msr_published_date":"2022-10-5","msr_highlight_text":"","msr_notes":"","msr_longbiography":"","msr_publicationurl":"","msr_external_url":"","msr_secondary_video_url":"","msr_conference_url":"","msr_journal_url":"","msr_s2_pdf_url":"","msr_year":0,"msr_citation_count":0,"msr_influential_citations":0,"msr_reference_count":0,"msr_s2_match_confidence":0,"msr_microsoftintellectualproperty":true,"msr_s2_open_access":false,"msr_s2_author_ids":[],"msr_pub_ids":[],"msr_hide_image_in_river":0,"footnotes":""},"msr-research-highlight":[],"research-area":[13556],"msr-publication-type":[193726],"msr-publisher":[],"msr-focus-area":[],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-post-option":[],"msr-field-of-study":[246658,246685,246808],"msr-conference":[],"msr-journal":[],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-pillar":[],"class_list":["post-883905","msr-research-item","type-msr-research-item","status-publish","hentry","msr-research-area-artificial-intelligence","msr-locale-en_us","msr-field-of-study-deep-learning","msr-field-of-study-machine-learning","msr-field-of-study-natural-language-processing"],"msr_publishername":"","msr_edition":"","msr_affiliation":"","msr_published_date":"2022-10-5","msr_host":"","msr_duration":"","msr_version":"","msr_speaker":"","msr_other_contributors":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_journal":"","msr_volume":"","msr_number":"","msr_editors":"","msr_series":"","msr_issue":"","msr_organization":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_notes":"","msr_highlight_text":"","msr_release_tracker_id":"","msr_original_fields_of_study":"","msr_download_urls":"","msr_external_url":"","msr_secondary_video_url":"","msr_longbiography":"","msr_microsoftintellectualproperty":1,"msr_main_download":"","msr_publicationurl":"","msr_doi":"","msr_publication_uploader":[{"type":"url","viewUrl":"false","id":"false","title":"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2210.01848","label_id":"243109","label":0}],"msr_related_uploader":"","msr_citation_count":0,"msr_citation_count_updated":"","msr_s2_paper_id":"","msr_influential_citations":0,"msr_reference_count":0,"msr_arxiv_id":"","msr_s2_author_ids":[],"msr_s2_open_access":false,"msr_s2_pdf_url":null,"msr_attachments":[],"msr-author-ordering":[{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Chandan Singh","user_id":42126,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Chandan Singh"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Jyoti Aneja","user_id":41338,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Jyoti Aneja"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Jianfeng Gao","user_id":32246,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Jianfeng Gao"}],"msr_impact_theme":[],"msr_research_lab":[199565,992148],"msr_event":[],"msr_group":[144931],"msr_project":[889815],"publication":[],"video":[],"msr-tool":[898776],"msr_publication_type":"unpublished","related_content":{"projects":[{"ID":889815,"post_title":"Towards scientific discovery with language models","post_name":"towards-scientific-discovery-with-language-models","post_type":"msr-project","post_date":"2022-10-20 11:22:18","post_modified":"2022-10-20 11:25:08","post_status":"publish","permalink":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/project\/towards-scientific-discovery-with-language-models\/","post_excerpt":"Posts and papers working towards scientific discovery with language models. 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