Pick the Mixture, Not the Samples: Combinatorial Data Selection for LLMs
Read the original on arXiv AI →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
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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.
arXiv:2510. 16882v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a commonly used technique to adapt large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks.
The paper evaluates coreset selection methods by incorporating both selection and training time into a unified wall‑clock budget, using a standardized benchmark across four datasets and multiple selectors. Across numerous budget anchors, simple random or full‑data training consistently outperforms sophisticated selectors, and selection costs are dominated by a full‑dataset scan that cannot be amortized. The study also identifies when subset reuse can justify selection and reports several correctness fixes in a popular codebase.
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:2510. 06048v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Effective data selection is essential for pretraining large language models (LLMs), enhancing efficiency and improving generalization to downstream tasks.
arXiv:2606. 15216v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diversity plays a critical role in data selection, improving performance under fixed data budgets by reducing redundancy and repetition.