REVIEW 11 cited by
Large-Scale Data Selection for Instruction Tuning
Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.
This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.
SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event
T0 review · schema-true
One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.
pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp
Large-Scale Data Selection for Instruction Tuning
read the original abstract
Selecting high-quality training data from a larger pool is a crucial step when instruction-tuning language models, as carefully curated datasets often produce models that outperform those trained on much larger, noisier datasets. Automated data selection approaches for instruction-tuning are typically tested by selecting small datasets (roughly 10k samples) from small pools (100-200k samples). However, popular deployed instruction-tuned models often train on hundreds of thousands to millions of samples, subsampled from even larger data pools. We present a systematic study of how well data selection methods scale to these settings, selecting up to 2.5M samples from pools of up to 5.8M samples and evaluating across 7 diverse tasks. We show that many recently proposed methods fall short of random selection in this setting (while using more compute), and even decline in performance when given access to larger pools of data to select over. However, we find that a variant of representation-based data selection (RDS+), which uses weighted mean pooling of pretrained LM hidden states, consistently outperforms more complex methods across all settings tested -- all whilst being more compute-efficient. Our findings highlight that the scaling properties of proposed automated selection methods should be more closely examined. We release our code, data, and models at https://github.com/hamishivi/automated-instruction-selection.
Forward citations
Cited by 11 Pith papers
-
From Instance Selection to Fixed-Pool Data Recipe Search for Supervised Fine-Tuning
AutoSelection discovers data recipes from a 90K instruction pool that outperform full-data training and other selectors on reasoning tasks for SFT across multiple models.
-
Beyond Variance: Prompt-Efficient RLVR via Rare-Event Amplification and Bidirectional Pairing
Positive-negative prompt pairing with weighted GRPO improves RLVR sample efficiency, raising AIME 2025 Pass@8 from 16.8 to 22.2 on Qwen2.5-Math-7B while matching large-scale training.
-
Reinforcement Learning for Reasoning in Large Language Models with One Training Example
One training example via RLVR boosts LLM math reasoning from 17.6% to 35.7% average across six benchmarks.
-
DRIFT: Refining Instruction Data via On-Policy Data Attribution
DRIFT applies on-policy influence functions with signed weighting and debiasing to attribute and refine SFT data, raising performance on 7B instruction and reasoning models over prior curation methods.
-
Interaction-Aware Influence Functions for Group Attribution
Extends influence functions with a second-order pairwise interaction term that improves group attribution accuracy over simple summation on multiple model-dataset pairs and instruction-tuning selection tasks.
-
HEALing Entropy Collapse: Enhancing Exploration in Few-Shot RLVR via Hybrid-Domain Entropy Dynamics Alignment
HEAL mitigates entropy collapse in few-shot RLVR by selectively adding general-domain data and aligning trajectory-level entropy dynamics, matching full-shot performance with 32 target samples.
-
GIST: Targeted Data Selection for Instruction Tuning via Coupled Optimization Geometry
GIST recovers a task-specific low-dimensional subspace from validation gradients using SVD and scores training examples by their alignment within this coupled subspace for LoRA-based instruction tuning.
-
A Critical Look at Targeted Instruction Selection: Disentangling What Matters (and What Doesn't)
Only gradient-based (LESS) representations make subset-to-query distance a reliable predictor of instruction-tuning performance; greedy round-robin helps most at small budgets, and random selection is surprisingly com...
-
Representation-Based Exploration for Language Models: From Test-Time to Post-Training
Representation-based elliptical bonuses improve inference-time and post-training pass@k for LLM reasoning, but the headline AIME result is tainted by validation/test overlap.
-
Rethinking Data Curation in LLM Training: Online Reweighting Offers Better Generalization than Offline Methods
ADAPT is an online reweighting framework for LLM training that outperforms offline data selection and mixing methods in cross-benchmark generalization under equal compute.
-
Influcoder: Distilling Decoders' Gradient Influence Rankings into an Encoder for Data Attribution
Influcoder distills decoders' gradient influence rankings into an encoder for scalable influence-based data attribution.
discussion (0)
Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.