Organizations: Alibaba International Digital Commerce Group, HangZhou, China · Hangzhou Lingju Intelligence AI Lab, Hangzhou, China · Hangzhou Dianzi University, HangZhou, China
Abstract
Instruction tuning has optimized the specialized capabilities of large language models (LLMs), but it often requires extensive datasets and prolonged training times. The challenge lies in developing specific capabilities by identifying useful data and efficiently fine-tuning. High-quality and diverse pruned data can help models achieve lossless performance at a lower cost. In this paper, we propose \textbf{SLAP}, a novel batch-aware data selection framework that evaluates the learnability of entire batch compositions rather than individual. SLAP ensures comprehensive data distribution coverage through distribution-aware stratified sampling while maximizing intra-batch diversity through relative distance optimization. By leveraging Hessian-approximated gradient information for dynamic batch selection, SLAP significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods across multiple model architectures (LLaMA, ChatGLM) and diverse downstream tasks including multi-turn dialogue, multilingual translation, and question answering. Most notably, SLAP achieves superior performance with 20-40% less training data compared to full dataset training, substantially reducing computational costs while maintaining or improving model capabilities. These results establish SLAP as a powerful approach for efficient and effective instruction tuning of large language models.
Instruction-tuning datasets for large language models (LLMs) are often large, redundant, and imbalanced, limiting efficient adaptation. Naive large-batch fine-tuning repeatedly includes overrepresented sample groups while weakly covering underrepresented but informative ones, especially under data parallelism (DP) across multiple GPUs. We propose CluSTER, a Cluster-aware balanced Sampling framework for Training Efficient data Reduction in DP instruction tuning. CluSTER curates a representative reduced dataset through gradient-space clustering and DP-aware balanced allocation, ensuring dual-level coverage across clusters and workers, while preserving the original data distribution by weighted update. As a result, CluSTER reduces redundant computation and improves training stability without compromising model quality. Across multiple instruction-tuning datasets, CluSTER reduces training time by up to 69.6% with almost no accuracy loss compared to prior sampling and data reduction methods. Code is available at https://github.com/kaist-dmlab/CluSTER.
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.
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.