Memory-assisted prompt editing to improve GPT-3 after deployment
Large LMs such as GPT-3, while powerful, are not immune to mistakes, but are
prohibitively costly to retrain. One failure mode is misinterpreting a user's
instruction (e.g., GPT-3 interpreting "What word is similar to good?" to mean a
homonym, while the user intended a synonym). Our goal is to allow users to
correct such errors directly through interaction -- without retraining. Our
approach pairs GPT-3 with a growing memory of cases where the model
misunderstood the user's intent and was provided with feedback, clarifying the
instruction. Given a new query, our memory-enhanced GPT-3 uses feedback from
similar, prior queries to enrich the prompt. Through simple proof-of-concept
experiments, we show how a (simulated) user can interactively teach a deployed
GPT-3, doubling its accuracy on basic lexical tasks (e.g., generate a synonym)
where users query in different, novel (often misunderstood) ways. In such
scenarios, memory helps avoid repeating similar past mistakes. Our simple idea
is a first step towards strengthening deployed models, potentially broadening
their utility. All the code and data is available at
this https URL
Authors
Aman Madaan, Niket Tandon, Peter Clark, Yiming Yang