Instruction-tuning datasets often contain substantial redundancy and low-quality samples, necessitating effective data selection methods. We propose an instruction data selection framework based on weighted in-context influence (wICI), which measures how effectively each candidate example reduces instruction-following difficulty for semantically related peers. Through systematic experiments, we address three key questions: what constitutes effective instruction tuning data from an in-context perspective, whether sample difficulty correlates with in-context influence, and how in-context influence translates to instruction tuning effectiveness. Experiments across multiple models and benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing baselines under constrained data budgets, while empirically showing that sample difficulty negatively correlates with in-context influence.
Data selection is a key component of efficient instruction tuning for large language models, as recent work has shown that data quality often matters more than data quantity. Accordingly, prior studies have introduced various multi-dimensional heuristics to evaluate and filter instruction data. However, most existing methods rely on static task-agnostic and model-agnostic weighting schemes, which overlook the varying requirements of specific downstream tasks and the differing pre-existing capabilities of models. In this paper, we propose a framework for learning multi-indicator weights that jointly adapts data selection to both the downstream task and the specific model. Our method identifies optimal weight configurations without full-scale fine-tuning by utilizing in-context learning (ICL) signals on compact tiny-validation sets. These signals serve as efficient performance proxies that ensure high-fidelity evaluation at minimal computational cost. Experiments across multiple benchmarks and model families, including Mistral, Qwen, and Llama, show that the approach achieves performance comparable to or exceeding full-dataset tuning while using only 30% of the training samples on GSM8K. Furthermore, our analysis reveals a trade-off between semantic diversity and logical complexity in reasoning tasks, highlighting the necessity of joint task-model adaptation.
Instruction following is a critical ability for Large Language Models to be used directly by humans. This often requires supervised fine-tuning on curated instruction datasets, sometimes complemented with an alignment step. However, in multilingual scenarios, obtaining high-quality data for these stages remains challenging, motivating the exploration of In-Context Learning (ICL) as a possible alternative. In this work, we study whether ICL can serve as a substitute for Instruction Tuning in multilingual language models, while also examining how the comparison changes with model scale. Our results indicate that a gap remains between ICL and Instruction Tuning, motivating further research to reduce it.
With Large Language Model (LLM) pre-training and fine-tuning shifting its focus from data volume to data quality, quality data selection has emerged as a critical research topic. Existing online data selection methods for LLM training are typically "batch-constrained", limiting optimization to local utility within random batches. To overcome this, we propose GAIA (Global Adaptive Instruction tuning via GAussian processes), a framework that formulates data valuation as a global estimation process. GAIA employs Gaussian Process regression to model continuous utility manifolds across the semantic space, utilizing an adaptive strategy fusion mechanism to dynamically prioritize high-utility samples. By casting the strategy-posterior update as an instance of the classical fixed-share Hedge framework for tracking the best expert, we inherit a dynamic-regret guarantee that characterizes GAIA's robustness under non-stationary quality scores during training. Empirical evaluations on three datasets demonstrate that GAIA significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines like \greats, establishing our method as a scalable and robust solution for efficient instruction tuning.