Robust LLM Data Selection via Content-Invariant Gradient Attribution
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The paper investigates what gradient similarity measures in data attribution for large language models. By independently varying task and answer format in supervised fine‑tuning benchmarks, the authors show that gradient alignment is driven by answer format rather than task semantics, with strong alignment for shared formats and none for differing formats. This pattern persists across training stages, model sizes, and families, and is evident in the selections of the LESS data‑selection method, which over‑represents its own answer format.
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The paper introduces the Controlled Attribution Benchmark (CATT), a synthetic evaluation framework that fine‑tunes language models on entirely fictitious knowledge to provide clear ground truth for data attribution. By systematically varying single dataset properties—such as document redundancy and lexical distractors—CATT reveals that these factors consistently degrade attribution performance. The study also explores two underexamined design choices: using negative log‑odds gradients instead of cross‑entropy gradients, and aggregating only the top token attribution scores, which together improve ground‑truth recall by 35–72 percentage points and enhance counterfactual retraining performance on FTRACE‑TREX by up to 4.9×.
arXiv:2606. 07524v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The explosive growth of large language models (LLMs) has created a heterogeneous and poorly documented ecosystem, making systematic model comparison increasingly important for provenance auditing, security analysis, and model selection.
arXiv:2608. 02879v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The widespread adoption of proprietary Large Language Models (LLMs) accessed strictly through closed APIs has created a critical challenge for responsible deployment: a fundamental lack of interpretability.