arXiv AI

When Do LLMs Help with Feature Selection? A Systematic Empirical Study

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 19

Data-DPO: Direct Preference Optimization for Target Model Data Selection in LLM Post-Training

Data-DPO is a target model‑oriented supervised fine‑tuning data selection method that uses one‑step probing of the target model to generate pairwise data preferences, trains a lightweight reward model to capture these preferences, and then selects a training subset by combining target‑model preference, external quality scores, and marginal diversity. Experiments on Vision‑Flan and LLaVA‑CoT demonstrate that Data‑DPO consistently outperforms existing data selection baselines across multiple data budgets and even surpasses full data training performance.

By Peng Sun, Yi Yang, Antong Zhang, Chunxiao Li, Yanbo Wang, Dianbo Liu, xin chen, Kai Yu, Lu Chen, Tianfan Fu
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 16

INCONVENIENT: A Benchmark to Assess LLM Generalization Capabilities from Convenience Samples

INCONVENIENT is a new benchmark that evaluates how machine‑learning models, especially large language models, generalize when trained on convenience samples that bias feature–target relationships. Unlike prior distribution‑shift tests that rely on natural domain splits, INCONVENIENT explicitly perturbs these relationships while keeping the deployment population unchanged, allowing controlled study of shift severity and direction. The benchmark covers 200 tabular classification and regression datasets and produces about 15,500 shifted training distributions, revealing significant performance degradation.

By Sara Rezaeimanesh, Chad Klochko, Kundan Thind, Mohammad Ghassemi
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 28

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
Jun 17

TuneAhead: Predicting Fine-tuning Performance Before Full Training Begins

arXiv:2606. 17660v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) is compute-intensive and error-prone: model performance depends sensitively on data quality and hyperparameter choices, and na\"ive runs can even degrade model performance.

By Yuxiang Luo, Haonan Long, Chen Wang, Qiqi Duan, Xiaotian Lin, Yanwei Xu, Yuyu Luo, Weikai Yang, Nan Tang
arXiv AI
Oct 12

SelectArena: A Modern Benchmark for Feature Selection on Real-world Tabular Data

SelectArena is a new benchmark for feature selection on real-world tabular data, evaluating 15 popular methods across 71 curated datasets for both classification and regression tasks. The study uses standardized protocols and modern foundation models, revealing trade-offs among predictive performance, runtime, stability, and validity. Tree-based methods (CART, RFImportance) and the F-Test emerge as Pareto-optimal choices, while search-based methods perform poorly in speed and stability.

By Bastian Sch\"afer, Dominika Matus, Lennart Purucker, Ricardo Knauer, Erik Rodner, Frank Hutter, Anton Sokolov, Arnaud Liefooghe
arXiv AI
Sep 4

Xiaomi-TabLDM: A Tabular Foundation Model Technical Report

Xiaomi-TabLDM is a tabular foundation model that performs classification and regression via in-context learning without task‑specific fine‑tuning. It is pretrained solely on synthetic data from structural causal models, achieving top‑ranked regression results on multiple benchmarks while reducing training and prediction time compared to leading models. The architecture incorporates a three‑stage training strategy, dual‑stream feature grouping, lightweight attention residuals, and sparse mixture‑of‑experts, and it can further improve accuracy through test‑time compute scaling.

By TabLDM Team, Penghui Wang, Wei Liu, Hong Wang, Chengyue Huang, Yuxi Sun, Zirui Wang, Hongming Huang, Quan Wang, Chunxiao Liu, Erli Meng, Bin Wang
arXiv AI
Aug 25

LLM-Specific Utility for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

The paper introduces the concept of LLM‑specific utility, defining it as the performance gain a target large language model (LLM) achieves when provided with a passage compared to answering without evidence. A benchmark of utilitarian passages is built for four LLMs (Qwen3‑8B/14B/32B and Llama 3.1‑8B) across three QA datasets, revealing that each model benefits most from its own tailored evidence and that evidence optimized for other models is consistently suboptimal. The authors also create SpecUBench, a benchmark for LLM‑specific utility judgment, and show that current utility‑aware retrieval methods largely capture model‑agnostic usefulness, struggling to estimate LLM‑specific utility. "whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates that retrieval‑augmented generation must consider model‑specific evidence selection to truly improve LLM performance, highlighting a gap in existing utility‑aware methods."

By Hengran Zhang, Keping Bi, Jiafeng Guo, Jiaming Zhang, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin, Xueqi Cheng