Enhanced Discriminative Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models for Chinese Text Classification

In the field of natural language processing, the era of Large Language Models (LLMs) has arrived. Text classification, being a classic and widely applied task, can greatly benefit from the advancements brought by LLMs to enhance its performance. We introduce an Enhanced Discriminative Fine-Tuning (ED-FT) approach aimed at enhancing discriminative text classification with LLMs, which we experimentally validate on the open-source Chinese LLM, Yi series. ED-FT utilizes a prompt encoder to search for the soft prompts in a continuous parameter space for downstream text classification tasks, combined with efficient fine-tuning techniques for LLMs. Additionally, we modify the attention mask of the Yi-6B model to incorporate bidirectional attention, enabling it to generate bidirectional representations of the input text sequences, which are then fed into an additional classification layer for non-generative text classification. We evaluate our method on three publicly available Chinese datasets: Tnews, ChnSentiCorp, and SMP2020-EWECT-Usual, achieving accuracy rates of 64.88%, 96.83%, and 83.35%, respectively. These results significantly surpass those of Bert-like models, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Additionally, it markedly improved inference speed. Furthermore, we explore the effectiveness of utilizing LLM intermediate layer hidden states for text classification, and the impact of LLM sizes.