COIG-CQIA: Quality is All You Need for Chinese Instruction Fine-tuning

Abstract

Remarkable progress on English instruction tuning has facilitated the efficacy and reliability of large language models (LLMs). However, there remains a noticeable gap in instruction tuning for Chinese, where the complex linguistic features pose significant challenges. Existing datasets, generally distilled from English-centric LLMs, are not well-aligned with Chinese users' interaction patterns. To bridge this gap, we introduce COIG-CQIA, a new Chinese instruction tuning dataset derived from various real-world resources and undergoing rigorous human verification. We conduct extensive experiments on COIG-CQIA, and compare them with strong baseline models and datasets. The experimental results show that models trained on COIG-CQIA achieve highly competitive performance in diverse benchmarks. Additionally, our findings offer several insights for designing effective Chinese instruction-tuning datasets and data-mixing strategies. Our dataset are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/m-a-p/COIG-CQIA.