Unified Data Selection for LLM Reasoning
Pith reviewed 2026-05-22 05:29 UTC · model grok-4.3
The pith
Summing entropy from the top 0.5 percent highest-entropy tokens ranks reasoning samples for effective LLM training.
A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.
Core claim
High-Entropy Sum quantifies reasoning quality by summing the entropy of only the top 0.5 percent highest-entropy tokens in each sample. When samples are ranked by this score, the highest-ranked 20 percent match the performance of training on the entire dataset under supervised fine-tuning. The same ranking produces better outcomes than baseline methods in rejection fine-tuning and allows reinforcement learning to extract stronger reasoning patterns from selected successful trajectories.
What carries the argument
High-Entropy Sum (HES), which aggregates entropy values from the top 0.5 percent highest-entropy tokens per reasoning sample to produce a quality score without any model training.
Load-bearing premise
The assumption that entropy concentrated in a tiny fraction of tokens per sample reliably signals high overall quality of the full reasoning trace, and that this signal remains consistent across models and tasks.
What would settle it
Training an LLM on the top 20 percent of HES-ranked samples and observing lower accuracy than the full dataset on a held-out reasoning benchmark such as GSM8K would falsify the central effectiveness claim.
Figures
read the original abstract
Effectively training Large Language Models (LLMs) for complex, long-CoT reasoning is often bottlenecked by the need for massive high-quality reasoning data. Existing methods are either computationally expensive or fail to reliably distinguish high- from low-quality reasoning samples. To address this, we propose High-Entropy Sum (HES), a training-free metric that quantifies reasoning quality by summing only the entropy of the top (e.g., 0.5\%) highest-entropy tokens in each reasoning sample. We validate HES across three mainstream training paradigms: Supervised Fine-tuning (SFT), Rejection Fine-tuning (RFT), and Reinforcement Learning (RL), with extensive results demonstrating its consistent effectiveness and significantly reduced computational overhead. In SFT, training on the top 20\% HES-ranked data matches full-dataset performance, while using the lowest-HES data degrades it. In RFT, our HES-based training approach significantly outperforms baseline methods. In RL, HES-selected successful trajectories enable the model to learn strong reasoning patterns, significantly surpassing other compared methods. Our findings establish HES as a robust, training-free metric that enables a unified, effective, and efficient method for developing advanced reasoning in LLMs.
Editorial analysis
A structured set of objections, weighed in public.
Referee Report
Summary. The paper proposes High-Entropy Sum (HES), a training-free metric that quantifies reasoning quality in LLM traces by summing the per-token entropy of only the top 0.5% highest-entropy tokens per sample. It validates this metric across three training paradigms—SFT, RFT, and RL—claiming that top-20% HES data matches full-dataset SFT performance, outperforms baselines in RFT, and yields stronger reasoning in RL while reducing computational overhead.
Significance. If the central claims hold after addressing the noted gaps, the work offers a practical, training-free data-selection tool that could lower the barrier to scaling long-CoT reasoning training. The unified evaluation across SFT/RFT/RL and the reported efficiency gains are genuine strengths; the manuscript also ships concrete empirical comparisons that could be reproduced if code and exact data splits are released.
major comments (2)
- [Abstract and §3] Abstract and §3 (HES definition): The metric is defined by summing entropy exclusively over the top 0.5% highest-entropy tokens, yet no derivation, sensitivity analysis, or cross-percentile ablation is presented. If the selected subset changes materially at 0.1% or 1%, the reported SFT/RFT/RL gains no longer demonstrate that HES is a stable, robust quality signal.
- [§4] §4 (experimental results): The manuscript reports consistent gains but provides no statistical significance tests, variance across random seeds, or controls that isolate the effect of the HES ranking from model size or task difficulty. Without these, it is unclear whether the top-20% HES subset truly matches full-dataset performance or merely reflects easier subsets.
minor comments (2)
- [§3] Notation for entropy computation (per-token vs. sequence-level) should be stated explicitly in the method section to avoid ambiguity when readers re-implement HES.
- [Figures in §4] Figure captions and axis labels in the experimental plots could be expanded to include the exact percentile threshold and base model used for entropy extraction.
Simulated Author's Rebuttal
We thank the referee for the constructive and detailed feedback on our manuscript. We address each major comment point by point below, indicating where revisions will be made to strengthen the work.
read point-by-point responses
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Referee: [Abstract and §3] Abstract and §3 (HES definition): The metric is defined by summing entropy exclusively over the top 0.5% highest-entropy tokens, yet no derivation, sensitivity analysis, or cross-percentile ablation is presented. If the selected subset changes materially at 0.1% or 1%, the reported SFT/RFT/RL gains no longer demonstrate that HES is a stable, robust quality signal.
Authors: We acknowledge that the manuscript does not include an explicit derivation or sensitivity analysis for the 0.5% threshold. This percentile was chosen empirically during preliminary experiments as it isolates the most uncertain tokens while avoiding dilution from lower-entropy ones. To address the concern directly, we will add a cross-percentile ablation study (0.1%, 0.5%, 1%, and 2%) to Section 3 and the appendix in the revised manuscript. Preliminary checks indicate that performance trends remain qualitatively stable across this range for the reported SFT, RFT, and RL settings, supporting robustness; the full results will be included to allow readers to evaluate stability. revision: yes
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Referee: [§4] §4 (experimental results): The manuscript reports consistent gains but provides no statistical significance tests, variance across random seeds, or controls that isolate the effect of the HES ranking from model size or task difficulty. Without these, it is unclear whether the top-20% HES subset truly matches full-dataset performance or merely reflects easier subsets.
Authors: We agree that reporting variance and statistical tests would improve interpretability. In the revision we will rerun the core SFT and RFT experiments across three random seeds, reporting means and standard deviations, and include paired t-tests or Wilcoxon tests against the full dataset and random baselines of equal size. To isolate HES ranking from task difficulty, we will add per-task breakdowns and comparisons against difficulty-stratified random subsets (using proxy metrics such as trace length or token count). These controls will help demonstrate that gains are driven by the entropy-based selection rather than incidental subset properties. Model-size effects are already partially controlled by using the same base model across conditions, but we will note this limitation explicitly. revision: yes
Circularity Check
No significant circularity: HES is an explicitly defined empirical metric validated by downstream experiments.
full rationale
The paper defines HES directly as the sum of per-token entropies for the top 0.5% highest-entropy tokens within each sample. This definition is not derived from or equated to the target performance outcomes; instead, the authors report separate experimental results showing that selecting top-20% HES data for SFT matches full-dataset performance, and that HES-based selection improves RFT and RL. No equations, self-citations, or uniqueness theorems are invoked that would reduce the claimed effectiveness to the definition itself. The 0.5% cutoff is presented as a design choice rather than a fitted parameter whose value is then 'predicted' from the same data. The derivation chain remains self-contained and externally falsifiable via the reported training outcomes.
Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger
free parameters (1)
- top entropy percentile threshold
axioms (1)
- domain assumption Entropy of selected tokens correlates with overall reasoning quality of the sample
Lean theorems connected to this paper
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IndisputableMonolith/Cost/FunctionalEquation.leanwashburn_uniqueness_aczel unclear?
unclearRelation between the paper passage and the cited Recognition theorem.
HESrelative = sum_{t | rank(H_t) >= 1-p} H_t with p=0.005; high-entropy tokens identified as top 0.5% of entropy distribution
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IndisputableMonolith/Foundation/AlphaCoordinateFixation.leanJ_uniquely_calibrated_via_higher_derivative unclear?
unclearRelation between the paper passage and the cited Recognition theorem.
Figure 1 and Section 3.1 contrast Sum Entropy of High-Entropy Tokens against Avg Entropy and total ES
What do these tags mean?
- matches
- The paper's claim is directly supported by a theorem in the formal canon.
- supports
- The theorem supports part of the paper's argument, but the paper may add assumptions or extra steps.
- extends
- The paper goes beyond the formal theorem; the theorem is a base layer rather than the whole result.
- uses
- The paper appears to rely on the theorem as machinery.
- contradicts
- The paper's claim conflicts with a theorem or certificate in the canon.
- unclear
- Pith found a possible connection, but the passage is too broad, indirect, or ambiguous to say the theorem truly supports the claim.
Reference graph
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