arXiv AI
Oct 2

Scalable, Transferable Meta-network for Data Selection Requires a Different Loss (and Why the Obvious Choice is Problematic)

The paper introduces TESS, a scalable data‑selection framework that replaces per‑sample weights with a selection network to improve transferability across datasets and model sizes. It identifies instability in existing meta‑learning for training‑data selection (MTS) due to weight suppression and overreliance on easy features, and proposes a Pointwise Value Matching objective to address these issues. Experiments on large language model safety and instruction tuning show strong transfer from subsets to full corpora and from smaller to larger models.

By Zilin Du, Bowen Yang, Boyang Albert Li