arXiv Machine Learning

A Critical Look at Targeted Instruction Selection: Disentangling What Matters (and What Doesn't)

arXiv:2602. 14696v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Instruction fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) often involves selecting a subset of instruction training data from a large candidate pool, using a small query set from the target task.

arXiv AI
Sep 2

Replacing Training with Memory: Listwise Selection for Text-to-SQL

The paper proposes a fine‑tuning‑free listwise selector for Text‑to‑SQL systems that replaces traditional learning objectives with inference‑time strategies. It introduces reusable structured memories (MaP‑SQL) that encode mappings from natural language to schema elements, SQL operations, and expected outputs, and uses these memories to evaluate candidate queries. To reduce positional bias, the method aggregates rankings across multiple input permutations, optimizing inference cost through execution results and pointwise scoring. The approach achieves higher selection accuracy, fewer unnecessary comparisons, and outperforms the prior state‑of‑the‑art R^3‑SQL on the BIRD‑dev benchmark while using fewer tokens.

By Yeonseok Jeong, Soyoung Yoon, Seongjun Lee, Seung-won Hwang
arXiv AI
Sep 23

LIMIT: Less Is More for Instruction Tuning in Text-to-SQL

LIMIT (Less Is More for Instruction Tuning in Text-to-SQL) challenges the belief that large instruction corpora are necessary for effective Text-to-SQL models. The framework uses a four‑stage data‑centric process—difficulty‑aware filtering, chain‑of‑thought synthesis, LLM‑as‑judge quality scoring, and genetic algorithm optimization—to select a compact set of examples that still achieve full schema coverage. On the BIRD and Spider benchmarks, LIMIT’s 796 and 863 samples enable Qwen3‑8B to reach 69.1% and 88.9% execution accuracy, outperforming methods trained on twenty times more data and setting a new state‑of‑the‑art for open‑source approaches.

By Haoyuan Ma, Hengwei Liu, Linjuan Wu, Yongliang Shen, Weiming Lu
arXiv AI
Jul 14

Coresets Before Score Sets: Evaluation-Unsupervised Prompt Subset Selection for LLM Benchmarks

arXiv:2607. 09739v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study LLM benchmark coreset selection: selecting a small subset of prompts over multiple benchmarks whose induced model scores and rankings approximate those obtained from the full benchmark suite.

By Jihan Yao, Gantavya Bhatt, Arnav Das, Peter Jin, Ke Bao, Qiaolin Yu, Khushi Bhardwaj, Chang Su, Jialei Wang, Yikai Zhu, Sugam Devare, Damon Mosk-Aoyama, Zhen Dong, Venkat Krishna Srinivasan, Yineng Zhang, Oleksii Kuchaiev, Jiantao Jiao, Banghua Zhu, Jeff Bilmes
arXiv Computation and Language
6d ago

Large Language Model Selection with Limited Annotations

arXiv:2605.24981v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Choosing a Large Language Model (LLM) for a given task requires comparing many strong candidates, yet standard evaluation relies on costly annotati...

By Yavuz Durmazkeser, Patrik Okanovic, Andreas Kirsch, Torsten Hoefler, Nezihe Merve G\"urel
arXiv AI
3d ago

Mitigating Memorization In Language Models

The paper explores ways to reduce the memorization of training data in language models, testing three regularizer-based, three finetuning-based, and eleven machine unlearning methods—five of which are newly introduced. It introduces TinyMem, a lightweight suite of small models for rapid testing of these mitigation techniques, and shows that unlearning methods, particularly BalancedSubnet, outperform others in removing memorized content while maintaining task performance. The study also finds that regularizer-based approaches are slow and ineffective, while finetuning methods are costly, especially when high accuracy is required.

By Mansi Sakarvadia, Aswathy Ajith, Arham Khan, Nathaniel Hudson, Caleb Geniesse, Kyle Chard, Yaoqing Yang, Ian Foster, Michael W. Mahoney
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

Synthesizing Instruction-Tuning Datasets with Contrastive Decoding

The paper introduces CoDIT, a contrastive decoding technique that separates instruction-following behavior from pre-trained world knowledge in large language models. By generating responses that emphasize post-training instruction capabilities while suppressing shared pre-trained knowledge, CoDIT creates instruction-tuning datasets that lead to consistently better model performance than directly generated responses or existing public datasets. The authors also provide theoretical and empirical evidence that CoDIT effectively distills instruction-tuning knowledge from model parameters into text, facilitating cross-architecture transfer.

By Tatsuya Ichinose, Youmi Ma, Masanari Oi, Ryuto Koike, Naoaki Okazaki