Alignment-Aware Selection

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3 papers in the last four weeks, against 2 the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

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Latest papers 37

Oct 1, 2026cs.CV

VASC: Value-Aware Sparse Attention with Cross-Layer Memory for Efficient 3D Reconstruction

Feed-forward 3D vision models such as VGGT have achieved remarkable progress, unifying camera estimation and dense scene reconstruction in a single pass. However, their quadratic global attention makes long image sequences expensive, while existing sparse methods may favor highly attended yet value-redundant regions. To address these limitations, we introduce VASC, a training-free sparse attention method combining value-aware block selection and execution-aware cross-layer memory. Our value-aware block selection integrates pooled query--key relevance with neighboring value contrast, reducing redundancy while preserving query-relevant and distinctive content. Cross-layer memory tracks unserved demand across layers and updates this state according to actual execution, enabling previously underserved blocks to compete under a fixed computation budget. Experiments on 7Scenes and NeuralRGB-D with VGGT and

π^3

demonstrate improved pose estimation and reconstruction quality compared with FasterVGGT, together with up to

2.29\times

faster inference than dense VGGT. Code is available at https://github.com/kosakayamahoo-design/VASC.

Junyi Wu, Fanqing Kong, Leyang Chen +2

Shanghai Jiao Tong University

3D Reconstruction Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer Self-Supervised Vision Transformers Alignment-Aware Selection

Sep 30, 2026cs.AI

What Should an Agent Remember? Disentangling Retention from Retrieval in Bounded-Memory Evaluation

A persistent agent must decide both what to retain as information arrives and what to surface once a query appears, yet memory evaluations can confound these decisions by comparing methods that differ in both retention and selection. We build a streaming-recall benchmark crossing retention and selection rules and evaluate every condition on the same 300 seeded episodes. Holding access fixed, query-aware selection improves required-fact recall by 15.5 percentage points (95% CI: 12.8 to 18.2), whereas a mixed comparison that also changes history access reports a 68.7-point advantage, of which 53.2 points are attributable to access. Under bounded retention, query-aware, dense, and oracle selection reach the retention ceiling, and all 319 observed failures in the bounded recency condition are caused by eviction rather than ranking errors. Recall falls to 0% as targets recede sufficiently far into the past. Repeating the evaluation on SQuAD preserves the retention ceiling while showing that dense retrieval can outperform lexical retrieval on natural text. These results show that bounded-memory evaluations should hold access fixed and report retention and selection separately.

Juli Huang

Stanford University

Retention Bounded-Memory Alignment-Aware Selection Persistence Streaming

Sep 29, 2026cs.LG

From Checkpoint Variation to Selection Gains in Supervised Fine-Tuning

Checkpoint selection is a routine decision in supervised fine-tuning (SFT): training produces multiple checkpoints, but only one is retained. Yet fixed-budget comparisons do not by themselves distinguish three empirical claims: whether more validation data improve checkpoint selection, whether a selection rule outperforms validation-loss selection, and whether it improves over simply retaining the final checkpoint. We therefore treat checkpoint selection as a finite-information decision problem. Holding completed training trajectories, candidate checkpoints, and independent test items fixed, we vary the validation budget and separately measure improvement from additional validation data, gain over negative log-likelihood (NLL) selection, and gain over the final checkpoint. Across 60 mathematical SFT trajectories and 19 configurations, increasing the validation budget from 32 to 305-313 examples raises independent-test accuracy by 0.32 percentage points (pp) for generated-accuracy selection and 0.29 pp for checkpoint agreement, with 95% configuration-bootstrap CIs of [0.10, 0.56] and [0.11, 0.50], respectively. At the full validation budget, the two generation-based rules outperform matched NLL selection by 0.71 and 0.85 pp, respectively, while their gains over the final checkpoint remain unresolved. A cross-domain replication on 12 newly trained Commonsense trajectories shows the same qualitative separation: increasing the validation budget from 32 to 1,024 questions improves generated-accuracy and checkpoint-agreement selection by 0.87 and 0.27 pp, while gains over the final checkpoint again remain unresolved. Together, these results show that benefiting from more validation data, outperforming NLL selection, and outperforming the final checkpoint are distinct empirical claims that require separate evidence.

Yupeng Chang, Wenxuan Zhang, Yuan Wu

School of Artificial Intelligence, Jilin University · Singapore University of Technology and Design · Key Laboratory of Symbolic Computation and Knowledge Engineering, Jilin University

Supervised Finetuning Alignment-Aware Selection Intermediate Checkpoints Model Fine-Tuning Token Budget Allocation

Sep 17, 2026cs.AI

EconSkills: Studying Skill Transfer and Retrieval for Web Agents on Live Economic Data

Web agents often revisit the same sites, yet most evaluations discard the procedures learned in earlier successful interactions. We introduce EconSkills, a skill library and evaluation framework that distills verified EconWebArena trajectories into parameterized standard operating procedures for retrieving live economic data. Each skill records its scope, navigation procedure, site-specific guidance, verification checks, and recovery steps while replacing source-instance values with placeholders. EconSkills separates two questions: whether a known relevant procedure transfers to a held-out task, and whether an agent can retain that benefit when selecting from a library. In controlled transfer, matched skills improve success over no-skill prompting and require fewer steps on paired successes, while abstraction is substantially more effective than replaying raw trajectories. At library scale, retrieval is competitive with the no-skill baseline overall and performs best on directly covered tasks; coverage-stratified outcomes show that approximate matches on uncovered tasks offset these gains. Browser trajectories further identify when procedural guidance shortens portal-specific navigation and when semantic verification remains necessary. These results establish that reusable economic web procedures can transfer across task instances and provide a concrete design target for coverage-aware selection and context delivery.

Yinzhu Quan, Zefang Liu

Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, GA, USA · Capital One San Jose, CA, USA

Economies Web Agents Data Science Agents Alignment-Aware Selection

Aug 31, 2026cs.CL

Latent Mechanisms of Language Control in Multilingual Language Models

Multilingual large language models can exhibit unintended code-switching -- unnecessarily alternating between languages during generation. We present a comparative study of three methods that identify language-controlling latents in cross-layer transcoders: activation value-based selection (ValSel), activation frequency-based selection (FreqSel), and LLM-generated latent annotation-based selection (AnnSel). To evaluate the efficacy of these methods in identifying language-controlling latents, we introduce two multilingual benchmarks that exhibit code-switching for fine-grained analysis of language steering across seven languages. Through targeted intervention experiments on Gemma-2-2B and Qwen3-4B, we find that all three methods effectively manipulate generation language, with FreqSel achieving the strongest overall performance, while AnnSel offering interpretable latent selection through explicit language annotations. A knock-out analysis suggests the methods select non-overlapping but each-functional latent subsets, indicating redundancy rather than a single canonical language direction. Code and data can be found at https://github.com/rm-3284/Latent-Mechanism-Multilingual.

Ryo Mitsuhashi, Sabri Boughorbel, Majd Hawasly

Princeton University New Jersey, USA · Prince Sattam bin Abdulaziz University Riyadh, Saudi Arabia · QCRI, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Doha, Qatar

Multilingual Language Models Code-Switching Multilingual Benchmark Video Latents Alignment-Aware Selection

Aug 31, 2026cs.LG

Exact Recovery Thresholds for Weighted Data Selection in Vector-Valued Linear Regression

We resolve the threshold part of Question 4 of the COLT 2025 open problem "Data Selection for Regression Tasks" of Hanneke, Moran, Shlimovich and Yehudayoff. In vector-valued linear regression with square loss

\ell_{(x,y)}(W)=|Wx-y|_2^2

, where

x\in\mathbb{R}^d

,

y\in\mathbb{R}^m

and the learner is the empirical risk minimizer of minimal Frobenius norm, we prove that the minimal budget of weighted examples that recovers the full-data loss on every finite dataset is exactly

n^*(d,m)=(m+1)d

. We further determine two more values of the weighted selection profile

F_w(d,m,n)

: at the near-threshold budget,

F_w(d,m,(m+1)d-1)=1+\frac{1}{dm^2}

, and at the spanning budget,

F_w(d,m,d)=d+1

for every

m

, while

F_w(d,m,n)=\infty

for

n<d

. For the smallest open intermediate cell

(d,m)=(2,2)

we prove

F_w(2,2,3)\in[13/8,15/8]

and

F_w(2,2,4)\in[5/4,3/2]

, reduce the conjectured exact values

13/8

and

5/4

to a finite moment problem on the circle with at most seven atoms, and establish strong structural evidence for the conjecture. The upper-bound techniques (a fixed-basis conic compression lemma, a determinant-facet rigidity theorem for maximal certificates, and sharp sparsification lemmas for zero-mean weighted point systems) are of independent interest. As a byproduct we correct an erroneous claim circulating in a recent unrefereed preprint, exhibiting an explicit dataset with

m=2

on which no weighted selection of

2d

points recovers the optimal loss. All results are new only for

m\ge 2

; the scalar case

m=1

is due to Hanneke et al.

Guangjian Zhang

Alignment-Aware Selection Spectral Norm Sparsity Token Budget Allocation

Aug 12, 2026cs.LG

Epiplexity Guided Data Selection and Generation for Out-of-Distribution Generalization

Modern systems are increasingly expected to transfer across tasks not specified during training. What data facilitates generalization in these new, unanticipated settings? One hypothesis is that data with more structural information could contain shared circuits and subprograms that could be recycled in a wider array of downstream settings. Epiplexity, a recently proposed measure of the structural information a compute-bounded learner can extract from data, provides a mechanism to reason about this relationship. In this paper, we show how to operationalize epiplexity as an online training signal for data selection and synthetic data generation. For selection, we fit scaling laws to the training loss curves of natural data domains to predict the expected epiplexity gain as a function of training tokens, and use this signal to adaptively determine the sampling weights over domains during training. For synthetic data generation, we define a generator's reward as the change in learner epiplexity over a buffer of previously generated data and use REINFORCE policy gradients to guide the generator toward an epiplexity-maximizing distribution. In both cases, higher epiplexity predicts improved downstream performance on zero-shot and fine-tuning based tasks, supporting the hypothesis that data rich in structural information yield representations that transfer across domains.

Ellen Su, Andres Potapczynski, Shikai Qiu +2

New York University · Inherent

Alignment-Aware Selection Out-Of-Distribution Distributional Fidelity

Aug 11, 2026cs.AI

Agentic Instruction Data Selection: Let DataMaster Interpret Your Intent

Although existing instruction data selection methods have introduced various metrics, the inherent complexity of real-world datasets makes it impractical for any single metric to generalize across all scenarios. Developers are thus often forced to manually inspect data and craft heuristic rules for each new application---a tedious and error-prone process. In this paper, we propose a paradigm shift from manual configuration to automated orchestration via the Instruction Data Selection Agent (DataMaster), which interprets user intent and autonomously composes optimal selection strategies. By allowing users to specify data needs through natural language descriptions, DataMaster simplifies data curation and removes the burden of manual strategy design. Extensive experiments across the math, medical, and code domains show that DataMaster outperforms static baselines in most settings and surpasses full-pool training in a substantial number of cases. The implementation of DataMaster and the scripts needed to reproduce the reported pipeline are publicly available at https://github.com/nju-websoft/DataMaster.

Fanqi Zhou, Qiaosheng Chen, Zixian Huang +1

State Key Laboratory of Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University · Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

Alignment-Aware Selection Data Science Agents Data-Curation Instruction Training Data Real-World Dataset

Jul 21, 2026cs.LG

SFGA: A Statistics-First Gating Architecture with Adjudicative Escalation for Trustworthy SFT Data Procurement

Procuring supervised fine-tuning (SFT) data forces a buyer to decide, before any downstream training, whether a candidate corpus is worth acquiring. We present \sys{}, a statistics-first gating architecture that treats procurement as a cost-aware routing problem over three intrinsic quality axes -- diversity, utility, and redundancy. Cheap blind measurements are summarised into per-axis estimates with confidence intervals; a gate accepts a decision only when intervals are tight, sample sizes are adequate, and the axes agree, otherwise it escalates the case to an adjudicative debate between a buy-advocate and a reject-advocate judge, resolved by a presiding verdict. On a controlled benchmark of 12 datasets (

2{\times}3{\times}2

grid over the three axes) with 5 seeds, the gate reaches 0.90 accuracy and 0.83

F_1

at $0.017 per unit, sitting between an always-verify baseline (0.75) and an oracle upper bound (0.98) while spending less than always-escalate ($0.020). We further report honest negative diagnostics of the debate path: a con-side win rate of 0.80 (

p\approx3{\times}10^{-6}

) and a 52% position-flip rate under advocate swapping expose negativity and positional biases that a naive LLM-judge would hide. We frame the injected-knob evaluation explicitly as a controlled synthetic benchmark for measurement fidelity and routing calibration, and delimit external validity as future work.

Arther Tian, Alex Ding, Simon Wu +1

DGrid AI

Gating Alignment-Aware Selection Synthetic Benchmark Training Data Escalation Fidelity

Jul 8, 2026cs.LG

Online Data Selection Is Implicit Alignment

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is often treated as a capability-adaptation step, while alignment is attributed to later preference optimization or reinforcement learning. This separation is incomplete: when examples are scored and kept online during fine-tuning, the choice of which data to train on already changes the model's behavioral preferences. We study online data selection as an implicit alignment mechanism. Given the same base model, optimizer, and selected-token budget, we compare random, loss-based, quality-based, and diversity-based online selectors and measure the behavioral drift they induce without any preference optimization. The proposed evaluation tracks helpfulness, refusal rate, verbosity, truthfulness, sycophancy, calibration, and jailbreak robustness, together with diagnostics for which behavioral modes are over-represented in the selected data. We formalize online selection as a reweighted SFT objective whose weights define an implicit preference over response styles and safety postures, so that an online scorer plays the role usually assigned to a reward model. This view predicts that high-scoring data can systematically favor longer, more assertive, more compliant, or more refusal-prone behaviors depending on how the online score is defined. Empirically, selectors that are statistically indistinguishable in task accuracy diverge sharply in refusal rate, verbosity, and sycophancy, and we show that the direction of the shift is predictable from the attribute mixture of the selected data. We introduce Alignment Drift Auditing (ADA), a controlled protocol for quantifying selection-induced behavioral movement, and Alignment-Aware Selection (AAS), a diagnostic online selector that retains data efficiency while constraining drift along safety and style axes.

Aoxiong Zeng, Yuxin Yang, Xiangquan Yang

East China Normal University · Shanghai University

Alignment-Aware Selection Model Fine-Tuning Value Alignment

Jun 25, 2026cs.DB

Understanding Domain-Aware Distribution Alignment in Budgeted Entity Matching

Entity Matching (EM) is a core operation in the data integration pipeline, where records from different sources are compared to determine whether they refer to the same real-world entity. Recent work has incorporated domain information and low-resource learning techniques to better adapt EM systems to realistic settings. While these approaches have demonstrated strong performance, it remains unclear how they behave under varying data constraints and levels of supervision in practice. In this paper, we investigate a state-of-the-art method for low-resource, domain-aware EM--BEACON--and study how its performance is affected by different algorithmic choices and data availability conditions. We conduct a series of targeted experiments to evaluate these variations, providing deeper insight into the role of distribution alignment and the behavior of the BEACON framework.

Nicholas Pulsone, Gregory Goren, Roee Shraga

Worcester Polytechnic Institute · Worcester, MA · Israel

Distributional Alignment Entities Alignment-Aware Selection

Jun 17, 2026cs.LG

BLADE: Scalable Bi-level Adaptive Data Selection for LLM Training

As Large Language Model (LLM) datasets scale to trillions of tokens, data selection has emerged as a critical frontier to filter out uninformative noise and construct adaptive learning trajectories. Beyond static heuristic filtering, advanced data selection methods for LLM training largely follow two paradigms, each with fundamental limitations. Influence-based methods provide principled bi-level objectives but require intractable inverse-Hessian computations, while excess-loss methods are computationally efficient but rely on a static reference model that becomes misaligned with the evolving proxy model during training. We propose BLADE (Bi-Level Adaptive Data sElection), a Hessian-free framework for data selection. BLADE reformulates the bi-level optimization problem underlying influence-based methods as a penalized single-level objective via Lagrange multipliers, avoiding inverse-Hessian computation while revealing a principled connection to excess-loss based data selection. The resulting objective recovers an excess-loss form but replaces the static reference model with a dynamic one that stays synchronized with training. Theoretically, we prove that this penalized formulation guarantees first-order convergence. For efficient online batch selection, we instantiate BLADE as a memoryless randomized block-coordinate Frank-Wolfe algorithm. Extensive experiments show that BLADE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art data selection baselines, providing a practical recipe for LLM training.

Jiaxing Wang, Deping Xiang, Jin Xu +9

Alignment-Aware Selection Large Language Model Training Hessian

Jun 16, 2026cs.LG

QueryMarket: Cost-Aware Online Active Learning in Data Markets

Data acquisition is a major bottleneck for learning in real-time streams: analysts must decide on the fly which labels to purchase while respecting a rolling budget. However, existing online active learning rarely unifies pricing, information gain, and rolling budget constraints under concept drift. We introduce QueryMarket, a market-inspired framework that queries each incoming data point based on its estimated utility to the model and its price. Within this framework, we propose OVBAL (online variance-based active learning), which integrates data pricing with information-driven selection by estimating each sample's marginal utility via a D-optimality criterion with exponential forgetting and executing cost-aware purchases under rolling budget constraints. OVBAL yields a simple, fully online decision rule that adapts to nonstationary streams and heterogeneous label costs. Experiments on synthetic data and a real-world solar power generation forecasting task show that OVBAL is particularly effective under seller-centric pricing and yields a more favorable long-run error-cost trade-off in the real-world task under both pricing schemes.

Xiwen Huang, Pierre Pinson

Dyson School of Design Engineering, Imperial College London, London, SW7 2DB, U.K. · Dyson School of Design Engineering, Imperial College London, London, U.K. · Halfspace (part of Accenture) +2

Pool-Based Active Learning Active Learning Learning-Augmented Algorithms Prices Alignment-Aware Selection Energy Forecasting

Jun 13, 2026cs.CL

Spokes: Optimizing for Diverse Pretraining Data Selection

Diversity plays a critical role in data selection, improving performance under fixed data budgets by reducing redundancy and repetition. However, optimizing for diversity is inherently challenging, as it is a set-level property that depends on interactions between data points rather than individual examples. As a result, existing approaches typically rely on proxies or approximations, which often fail to ensure sufficiently diverse subsets. In this work, we directly optimize diversity by introducing a probabilistic diversification framework based on the G-Vendi score, optimized via exponentiated gradient descent. Our method produces subsets that are substantially more diverse than those obtained via random sampling, achieving a +489 increase in G-Vendi score on a 500k-sample subset. We evaluate our approach on FineWeb and DCLM, where it consistently outperforms existing methods. Notably, SPOKES (diversity-only) improves average downstream performance by +0.4 and +0.5 points over random sampling on DCLM and FineWeb, respectively. More importantly, jointly optimizing for both quality and diversity yields the strongest results: SPOKES achieves gains of +1.5 and +1.4 points on DCLM and FineWeb, outperforming all baselines, including semantic deduplication and quality filtering.

Clarence Lee, Yejin Choi, Luke Zettlemoyer +2

DSO National Laboratories · Stanford University · University of Washington

Alignment-Aware Selection Subsampling Top-K Pretraining

Jun 9, 2026cs.CL

Hubs or Fringes: Pretraining Data Selection via Web Graph Centrality

The performance of modern language models depends critically on pretraining data composition. Yet existing data selection methods rely on auxiliary classifiers for document scoring or mixture optimization, adding computational overhead and dependence on labeled data. We propose WebGraphMix, a lightweight data selection framework that computes structural centrality scores over the Common Crawl host-level web graph and uses them to vary the proportion of central versus peripheral documents in the pretraining mixture. We hypothesize that central hosts expose models to reusable abstractions, while peripheral hosts encode specialized, long-tail knowledge. WebGraphMix computes centrality scores efficiently at web scale, requiring no model training, labeled data, or downstream supervision. We integrate WebGraphMix into the DataComp-LM pipeline and train models at 400M and 1B parameter scales with 8B and 28B tokens respectively, evaluating on 23 tasks ranging from factual knowledge to symbolic reasoning. Our experiments show that central and peripheral web regions encode complementary capabilities. Mixture combining both at a ratio of 1:1 achieves 41.4% on average, compared to 39.8% for uniform sampling. Combining structural scores with document-level quality classifier scores further improves performance to 43.8%. These findings demonstrate that web graph topology is a meaningful axis for pretraining data curation, capturing information that is largely orthogonal to existing content-based approaches.

Vedant Badoni, Danqi Chen, Xinyi Wang

Princeton Language and Intelligence

Multiple Centrality Measures Alignment-Aware Selection Graph Representations

Jun 9, 2026cs.LG

Unifying Data, Memory, and Compute Efficiency in LLM training: A Survey

Resource constraints increasingly determine what can be trained, fine-tuned, and deployed in large language models (LLMs), yet efficiency is often studied through isolated techniques rather than as an interacting system of limits. This survey adopts a constraint-centric perspective and organizes recent progress around three coupled bottlenecks: data efficiency (what to train on), memory efficiency (how to fit training), and compute budget awareness (when and where to spend FLOPs). On the data axis, we review selection and pruning methods that maximize learning per token, ranging from scalable proxy signals based on learning dynamics to gradient- and influence-based scoring, as well as difficulty-aware and curriculum-style strategies. We highlight emerging evidence that different notions of good data dominate in different regimes, implying that optimal subsets depend on the task objective and resource budget rather than being universal. On the systems side, we show that GPU memory, not raw compute, is often the dominant bottleneck in fine-tuning, and that effective scaling requires jointly reducing weight storage, optimizer states, and activation memory rather than optimizing any single component in isolation. Beyond memory, we frame training and inference as compute-governed processes in which optimization, data selection, and decoding must explicitly account for finite FLOP budgets. We review evidence for compute-optimal allocation and stopping rules, where computation should be halted or reallocated once marginal performance gains fall below a budget-dependent threshold. Together, these results unify compute-aware data selection, scaling laws, and adaptive inference under a common principle of resource-conditioned decision-making.

Vanessa Schmidt, Huy Hoang Nguyen, Cédric Jung +2

Chair of Information Theory and Data Analytics (INDA), RWTH Aachen University, 52074 Aachen, Germany · AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH, 1210 Vienna, Austria · Automation and Control Institute, Technische Universität Wien (TUW), 1040 Vienna, Austria

Alignment-Aware Selection Large Language Model Training Bounded-Memory Peak Memory Efficiency

Jun 5, 2026cs.CL

Unlocking Latent Value: Taxonomy-Guided Recovery of High-Performing Data from Low-Tier Web Corpora

Dominant web data curation pipelines for pretraining collapse document quality into a single composite score, systematically missing high-value content along dimensions the scorer underweights. We present a taxonomy-driven framework that recovers this value by filtering along semantically meaningful dimensions that composite scores fail to capture. First, building on the ESSENTIAL-WEB taxonomy, we introduce two novel dimensions: timeliness and cultural specificity, both of which show low pairwise NMI with existing ones. We annotate 14M documents using Qwen2.5 32B and distill into a lightweight 0.5B model. To enable rapid corpus-wide annotation, we additionally train a 73M multi-task MLP on E5 embeddings, achieving 50x inference throughput. Second, to navigate the combinatorial explosion of filter configurations, we introduce a compute-efficient two-pass framework: Pass 1 identifies the strongest dimension signals at small scale; Pass 2 constructs and evaluates conjunctive and disjunctive compound filters from the top performers - identifying high-performing configurations at a fraction of full scaling-law cost. Applying the selected filters to deprioritized web data, taxonomy-filtered subsets outperform their unfiltered baselines and even surpass the highest-quality tier. On mid-tier data, our best filter improves over its unfiltered baseline by 12.1% on reasoning, 9.5% on coding, and 2.0% on knowledge benchmarks, exceeding unfiltered top-tier data by 6.7% on reasoning and 13.7% on coding. Furthermore, filtered data from two tiers below the typical production threshold improves by 22.3% on reasoning and 19.5% on coding over its unfiltered baseline, surpassing top-tier data on coding benchmarks. These results establish that vast latent value remains locked in deprioritized web data, and that multi-dimensional taxonomy filtering is a principled, compute-efficient key to unlocking it.

Neeraj Varshney, Sanket Lokegaonkar, Nasser Zalmout +3

Amazon

Taxonomy Data-Curation Text Corpora Alignment-Aware Selection Representation Collapse

Jun 5, 2026cs.LG

HARP: Efficient Data Selection for Finetuning Large Language Models

Finetuning data selection requires balancing two competing goals: selecting examples that improve the downstream objective, and doing so without repeatedly finetuning models. Train-free selectors are scalable but rely on proxies such as embedding similarity or clustering, which may not match the target objective. Train-based selectors better reflect downstream utility through gradient signals, subset evaluation, or Shapley attribution, but require many costly train--evaluate iterations. We propose Hierarchical Active Region Pruning (HARP), an efficient train-based selector that preserves downstream alignment while reducing selection cost. HARP organizes the training pool into a node--leaf hierarchy, evaluates only representative leaves, and infers unmeasured utilities with empirical Bayes posteriors. It then selects data using two complementary envelopes: HARP-C, which conservatively controls redundancy, and HARP-E, which additively rewards complementary regions. We theoretically show that, under local smoothness and bounded estimation error, HARP controls selection error while reducing train--evaluate cost. We further validate that HARP variants achieve the best result and outperform the strongest baseline by up to

+8.9

points, while using roughly

7\times

fewer training examples.

Ning Wang, Zhengxin Zhang, Maosen Tang +3

Cornell University · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Alignment-Aware Selection Downstream Reasoning Empirical Bayes

Jun 2, 2026cs.DB

MLSkip: Data Skipping for ML Filters via Lightweight Metadata

Database vendors recently released AI functions that can be used in filter predicates. As such functions often rely on costly, black-box ML models, they unveil new data management challenges. Concretely, traditional data skipping techniques for integer and string data fail to be applicable to the new filter type. Indeed, there is no known mechanism for pruning non-qualifying row groups, e.g., when reading files from blob storage. In this work, we initiate the study of data skipping techniques for ML filters. We make the case that Parquet's default min-max metadata is enough to enable pruning. To this end, we draw connections to two lines of research: (i) the recently proposed query language for ML models and (ii) neural network verification. Our preliminary results on ReLU architectures show that on tables from TPC-H and TPC-DS, the average pruning effectiveness for filters of selectivity below 0.1% amounts to 27.4%. Finally, inspired by research on spatial joins, we propose an enhanced metadata structure: a size-bounded 2D convex hull that verification tools can make better use of, increasing the pruning effectiveness to 38.31%, while occupying at most 45 bytes per row group and column pair. We observe an end-to-end speedup of 1.07

\times

over PyTorch in DuckDB.

Mihail Stoian, Mark Gerarts, Pascal Ginter +3

University of Technology Nuremberg Nuremberg, Germany · Hasselt University Hasselt, Belgium · Technical University of Munich Munich, Germany

Data Lakes Skip Alignment-Aware Selection Decode Speedup

May 29, 2026cs.CL

Towards Efficient LLMs Annealing with Principled Sample Selection

The annealing phase is a pivotal convergence stage in LLM pre-training that ultimately determines final model quality. However, effectively selecting training data during this phase remains a key challenge. Current strategies rely on empirical heuristics, such as domain filtering or context extension, which lack a principled grounding in optimization theory. In this work, we characterize the annealing phase through the lens of the loss landscape's spectral geometry. We argue that optimal convergence requires gradient updates to satisfy heterogeneous constraints across different eigen-directions. Building on this insight, we formulate data selection as a problem of satisfying these directional constraints. To this end, we propose DiReCT (Directionally-Restrained Constrained Training), a novel framework that reformulates sample selection in the annealing stage as a constrained optimization problem. By imposing explicit directional constraints on per-sample gradients based on the spectral properties of the Hessian, DiReCT identifies samples that align with the optimal curvature-aware descent path. Extensive experiments across various model scales demonstrate that DiReCT consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance. For future research, code is available at https://github.com/xuyj233/Direct.

Yuanjian Xu, Jianing Hao, Wanbo Zhang +2

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Guangzhou, China · Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, China · Fudan University, Shanghai, China

Large Language Model Training Alignment-Aware Selection Annealing Convergence

May 28, 2026cs.AI

MIRA: Mid-training Rubric Anchoring for Source-Aware Data Selection

Mid-training has become an important stage in modern LLM development, using large-scale curated mixtures to strengthen capabilities before final post-training. Its data selection problem is distinct: the data are optimized under a pretraining-style objective at near-pretraining scale, but are curated toward downstream capabilities and drawn from heterogeneous sources with different formats and training roles. As a result, effective selection requires both scalability and source-adaptive semantic criteria. Existing model-based methods scale well, but provide only implicit quality signals. Semantic selection methods offer stronger judgments, but usually assume fixed rubrics or standardized data formats. To address this mismatch, we propose MIRA, a source-aware filtering framework based on self-anchored rubric discovery. The key idea is to make rubric construction part of data selection: MIRA first discovers what should be evaluated for each source group, then distills those judgments into scalable student scorers for full-corpus filtering. On code-oriented mid-training with 21 sources and 5 source groups, MIRA outperforms selection baselines across nine code benchmarks and matches the full-corpus run while using only half the tokens.

Haowen Wang, Yaxin Du, Jian Yang +9

1Beihang University · 2IQuest Research · 3Shanghai Jiao Tong University +2

Alignment-Aware Selection Training Data Rubrics

May 20, 2026cs.LG

PRISM: Preference-Aware Influence Function Based Data Selection Method for Efficient Fine-Tuning

As LLMs continue to scale up, improving training efficiency heavily relies on effective data utilization. Data selection mitigates this issue by allocating the limited training budget to high-value examples that optimally facilitate the model's target behavior. Most existing approaches define target behavior via a set of target examples and score candidate training data based on their estimated influence on these samples. However, such methods uniformly treat all target examples as equally important, ignoring the varying relevance of individual examples to model optimization. Specifically, target examples that align closely with the model's inherent behavior deliver stronger supervisory signals, whereas discrepant examples yield only weak and ineffective local guidance. We propose PRISM, a Preference-aware Influence function based Data Selection Method. It leverages model preference to assign weights to target examples and builds a preference-aware target direction. PRISM evaluates candidate training samples according to their influence on this direction, and prioritizes data budget allocation to samples that effectively drive the model to match expected target behavior. Theoretical analysis verifies that weighted preference construction generates a superior first-order gradient direction for boosting target preference, compared with uniform aggregation strategies. Extensive experiments covering diverse model architectures and parameter scales demonstrate that PRISM achieves better performance in efficient fine-tuning and safety-aligned supervised fine-tuning rectification. The results validate that accurate characterization of target behavior serves as the core of cost-effective data selection.

Qihao Lin, Guanxu Chen, Dongrui Liu +1

Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

Alignment-Aware Selection Model Fine-Tuning Influence Function Preference Alignment Learning Prism Influence

May 19, 2026cs.LG

A Bitter Lesson for Data Filtering

We investigate data filtering for large model pretraining via new scaling studies that target the high compute, data-scarce regime. In spite of an apparently common belief that filtering data to include only high-quality information is essential, our experiments suggest that with enough compute, the best data filter is no data filter. We find that sufficiently trained large parameter models not only tolerate low-quality and distractor data, but in fact benefit from nominally ``poor'' data.

Christopher Mohri, John Duchi, Tatsunori Hashimoto

Department of Computer Science Stanford University · Departments of Statistics and Electrical Engineering Stanford University

Model Size Pretraining Alignment-Aware Selection Distractor

May 15, 2026cs.LG

SEED: Targeted Data Selection by Weighted Independent Set

Data selection seeks to identify a compact yet informative subset from large-scale training corpora, balancing sample quality against collection diversity. We formulate this problem as a Weighted Independent Set (WIS) on a similarity graph, where nodes represent data samples weighted by influence, and edges connect semantically redundant pairs. This formulation naturally yields subsets that are simultaneously high-quality and diverse. However, two challenges arise in practice: naive node weights fail to distinguish informative signals from gradient noise, and edge construction under heterogeneous domain distributions produces structurally imbalanced graphs that bias selection toward sparse regions. To address these issues, we introduce two principled refinements from a unified graph perspective: (1) \textit{node value calibration} that restricts influence estimation to the bilateral salient subspace to ground node importance in task-relevant signals rather than surface-level statistics; (2) \textit{local scale normalization} that adapts edge thresholds to local neighborhood density, mitigating graph imbalance induced by cross-domain distribution shifts. Together, these components yield a robust and scalable data selection pipeline dubbed SEED. We further construct \texttt{Honeybee-Remake-SEED-200K}, a compact multimodal dataset curated by SEED. Extensive experiments show that SEED consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods on instruction tuning, visual instruction tuning, and semantic segmentation across diverse model families.

Yuan Zhang, Lifeng Guo, Junwen Pan +5

School of Computer Science, Peking University · Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications · Tianjin University +2

Alignment-Aware Selection Adaptive Sampling Semantic Segmentation Heterogeneity Class Imbalance Maximum Independent Set

May 14, 2026cs.LG

Beyond What to Select: A Plug-and-play Oscillatory Data-Volume Scheduling for Efficient Model Training

Data selection accelerates training by identifying representative training data while preserving model performance. However, existing methods mainly focus on designing sample-importance criteria, i.e., deciding what to select, while typically fixing the selected data volume as the target ratio throughout training. Thus, they are often dynamic in sample identity but static in data volume. In this work, we revisit data selection from an optimization perspective and show that selected-data training induces an implicit regularization effect modulated by the instantaneous selection ratio. This reveals a key trade-off: lower ratios amplify selection-induced regularization, whereas higher ratios preserve data coverage and optimization fidelity. Motivated by this insight, we propose PODS, a Plug-and-play Oscillatory Data-volume Scheduling framework. Rather than introducing another sample-scoring metric, PODS serves as a lightweight module that dynamically schedules how much data to select over training. Under the target selection ratio, PODS alternates between low-ratio regularization phases and high-ratio recovery phases to exploit selection-induced regularization without sacrificing optimization stability. With its lightweight, ratio-level, and task-agnostic design, PODS is compatible with existing static and dynamic selection methods and broadly applicable across training paradigms. Experiments across various datasets, architectures, and tasks show that PODS consistently improves the efficiency-generalization trade-off, e.g., reducing ImageNet-1k training cost by 50% with improved accuracy and accelerating LLM instruction tuning by over 2x without performance degradation.

Suorong Yang, Hanqi Zhu, Hai Gan +4

1National University of Singapore · 2Nanjing University · 3Hokkaido University +1

Alignment-Aware Selection Regularization Imagenet

May 13, 2026cs.NE

WASHH: An Anchor-Aware Whale-Guided Selection Hyper-Heuristic for Continuous Optimization and SVC Configuration

Learning-assisted algorithm design often has to make reliable search decisions under small evaluation budgets, where committing to a single metaheuristic can be unreliable. We propose WASHH, a Whale-guided Adaptive Selection Hyper-Heuristic for continuous black-box optimization. WASHH uses WOA as the main exploitation backbone, but treats PSO-style memory, GWO-style leader averaging, DE-style variation, local coordinate search, and anchor-guided refinement as selectable search behaviors. An online reward controller allocates evaluations according to observed improvements, while anchor refinement exploits inexpensive reference configurations such as box centers or default model settings without bypassing black-box evaluation. On ten 30-dimensional benchmark functions with 10 independent runs and 12,000 evaluations, WASHH achieves the best average rank, 1.10, and is best or tied best on all ten functions. It strictly improves over WOA on eight functions and ties WOA at the numerical optimum on Rastrigin and Griewank. We further study SVC hyperparameter configuration for breast cancer diagnosis under a 300-evaluation budget. WASHH obtains the lowest mean validation log loss among the compared optimizers, suggesting that anchor-aware selection hyper-heuristics are a practical lightweight direction for LEAD systems.

Yifu Zhao, Xiaofan Zou, Junhao Wei +9

Faculty of Applied Sciences, Macao Polytechnic University, Macao, 999078, China · School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering and Automation, Shanghai University, Shanghai, 200444, China · Pazhou Lab (Huangpu), Guangzhou, 510555, China +2

Black-Box Optimization Metaheuristics Alignment-Aware Selection Heuristics Sparse Spatial Anchors Peak Memory

May 13, 2026cs.CL

SLAP: Stratified Loss-based Pruning for On-Policy Data-Efficient Instruction Tuning

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.

Run Zou, Jianhang Ding, Yifan Ding +3

Alibaba International Digital Commerce Group, HangZhou, China · Hangzhou Lingju Intelligence AI Lab, Hangzhou, China · Hangzhou Dianzi University, HangZhou, China

Instruction Tuning Alignment-Aware Selection

May 13, 2026cs.LG

Data Difficulty and the Generalization--Extrapolation Tradeoff in LLM Fine-Tuning

Data selection during supervised fine-tuning (SFT) can critically change the behavior of large language models (LLMs). Although existing work has studied the effect of selecting data based on heuristics such as perplexity, difficulty, or length, the reported findings are often inconsistent or context-dependent. In this work, we systematically study the role of data difficulty in fine-tuning from both empirical and theoretical perspectives, and find that there is no universally optimal difficulty level; rather, its effectiveness depends on the dataset size. We show that for a fixed data budget, there exists an optimal data difficulty for SFT, and that this optimal difficulty shifts toward harder data as the data budget increases. To explain this phenomenon, we conduct controlled synthetic experiments that reveal a simple underlying mechanism: the interplay between the (in-distribution) generalization gap and the extrapolation gap. We further support this mechanism through a theoretical analysis using PAC-Bayesian generalization bounds. Overall, our results clarify how data size and difficulty jointly affect the trade-off between generalization and extrapolation in SFT, providing guidance for difficulty-based data selection under certain model and data conditions.

Siyuan Liu, Tinghong Chen, Xinghan Li +2

IIIS, Tsinghua University · College of AI, Tsinghua University · Shanghai Qi Zhi Institute +1

Large Language Model Fine-Tuning Model Fine-Tuning Alignment-Aware Selection Extrapolation

May 12, 2026cs.LG

How Faithful Is Trajectory-Based Data Attribution? Error Sources, Remedies, and Practical Guidelines

Trajectory-based data attribution methods estimate the influence of training samples on model predictions by unrolling the training trajectory. They are widely used in applications such as data selection, data valuation, and model diagnosis, but there is a lack of comprehensive error analysis of these methods, raising concerns about method faithfulness and hindering reliable deployment. In this work, we provide the first systematic analysis of error sources in trajectory-based data attribution, together with concrete remedies to mitigate them and practical guidelines for downstream use. We organize the total error into three categories, config-level, algorithm-level, and system-level. We make three contributions. First, we identify optimizer mismatch as the dominant config-level error: existing methods derive their attribution under the assumption of SGD, even for models trained with the modern de facto optimizer AdamW. We propose AdamW-influence to fully account for AdamW's optimization dynamics, yielding improvements from 10% to over 300% in Spearman correlation between estimated and ground-truth influence across four settings spanning MLP, CNN, GPT-2, and Llama 3.2-1B. Second, we isolate the remaining algorithm-level error arising from the first-order Taylor approximation, identify the learning rate and trajectory length as factors governing the error magnitude, and derive a closed-form error proxy that can be evaluated along the original trajectory without retraining. Third, we translate these insights into practical guidelines for data selection by unifying offline and online strategies under a K-step look-ahead framework. Under this framework, online selection with a short horizon often matches or exceeds offline, and the optimal horizon can be tuned jointly with the learning rate. Together, these results turn the framework into an actionable selection recipe for practitioners.

Junwei Deng, Pingbang Hu, Suliang Jin +4

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · University of Michigan · Princeton University +1

Alignment-Aware Selection Log-Ratio-Based Gaussian Trust Weight Mismatch

May 11, 2026cs.AI

Constraint-Data-Value-Maximization: Utilizing Data Attribution for Effective Data Pruning in Low-Data Environments

Attributing model behavior to training data is an evolving research field. A common benchmark is data removal, which involves eliminating data instances with either low or high values, then assessing a model's performance trained on the modified dataset. Many existing studies leverage Shapley-based data values for this task. In this paper, we demonstrate that these data values are not optimally suited for pruning low-value data when only a limited amount of data remains. To address this limitation, we introduce the Constraint-Data-Value-Maximization (CDVM) approach, which effectively utilizes data attributions for pruning in low-data scenarios. By casting pruning as a constrained optimization that both maximizes total influence and penalizes excessive per-test contributions, CDVM delivers robust performance when only a small fraction of the data is retained. On the OpenDataVal benchmark, CDVM shows strong performance and competitive runtime.

Danilo Brajovic, David A. Kreplin, Marco F. Huber

Fraunhofer IPA, Stuttgart, Germany · Institute of Industrial Manufacturing and Engineering IFF, University of Stuttgart, Germany · Hochschule Heilbronn, Germany

Alignment-Aware Selection Limited Data Maximization Environment

May 11, 2026cs.LG

Is Data Shapley Not Better than Random in Data Selection? Ask NASH

Data selection studies the problem of identifying high-quality subsets of training data. While some existing works have considered selecting the subset of data with top-

m

Data Shapley or other semivalues as they account for the interaction among every subset of data, other works argue that Data Shapley can sometimes perform ineffectively in practice and select subsets that are no better than random. This raises the questions: (I) Are there certain "Shapley-informative" settings where Data Shapley consistently works well? (II) Can we strategically utilize these settings to select high-quality subsets consistently and efficiently? In this paper, we propose a novel data selection framework, NASH (Non-linear Aggregation of SHapley-informative components), which (I) decomposes the target utility function (e.g., validation accuracy) into simpler, Shapley-informative component functions, and selects data by optimizing an objective that (II) aggregates these components non-linearly. We demonstrate that NASH substantially boosts the effectiveness of Shapley/semivalue-based data selection with minimal additional runtime cost.

Xiao Tian, Jue Fan, Rachael Hwee Ling Sim +3

Department of Computer Science, National University of Singapore, Singapore · Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore

Alignment-Aware Selection Shapley Value Shapley Additive Explanations Data Quality Random

May 10, 2026cs.LG

Let the Target Select for Itself: Data Selection via Target-Aligned Paths

Targeted data selection seeks training examples from a candidate pool that improve downstream task performance. While trajectory-based selectors effectively guide this process, existing approaches typically construct reference states by warming up on the candidate pool itself, thereby inheriting pool-dependent distributional biases. To address this coupling, we introduce Target-Aligned Candidate Selection (TACS), which constructs a short, capacity-constrained reference path using a compact target-validation proxy. Candidates are ranked by their normalized loss reduction along this trajectory, requiring only forward passes and allowing the path to be reused across distinct pools for a fixed model-target pair. Empirically, TACS achieves competitive downstream performance across controlled logistic, vision, and NLP benchmarks, while slashing selection compute by up to 69% and candidate storage to less than 10 MB in large-scale instruction tuning.

Huitao Yang, Hengzhi He, Tung Sum Thomas Kwok +1

University of California, Los Angeles

Alignment-Aware Selection Adaptive Sampling Reweighting Distributional Alignment Target Domain Instruction Tuning+2

May 9, 2026cs.LG

DARE: Difficulty-Adaptive Reinforcement Learning with Co-Evolved Difficulty Estimation

Reinforcement learning improves the reasoning ability of large language models but remains costly and sample-inefficient, as many rollouts provide weak learning signals. Difficulty-aware data selection methods attempt to address this by prioritizing moderately difficult prompts, yet our analysis reveals three limitations: difficulty estimates become inaccurate under policy drift, data selection alone yields limited final-performance gains, and inference efficiency remains largely unchanged. These findings suggest that efficient and effective RL requires more than filtering by difficulty: the policy should learn to solve hard tasks while producing concise responses for easy ones. To this end, we propose Dare, a unified framework that co-evolves difficulty estimation with the policy via self-normalized importance sampling, maintains diverse difficulty coverage through a symmetric Beta sampling distribution, and applies tailored training strategies across difficulty tiers with adaptive compute allocation. Extensive experiments across multiple models and domains demonstrate that Dare consistently outperforms existing methods in training efficiency, final effectiveness, and inference efficiency, producing more concise responses on easy tasks while improving correctness on hard ones. Code is available at https://github.com/EtaYang10th/DARE.

Yang Zhou, Can Jin, Zihan Dong +7

Rutgers University · Amazon · Washington University +1

Large Language Model Reinforcement Learning Alignment-Aware Selection Efficient Inference

May 8, 2026cs.RO

How to Utilize Failure Demo Data?: Effective Data Selection for Imitation Learning Using Distribution Differences in Attention Mechanism

Imitation learning for robotic tasks has relied primarily on policies trained only on successful demonstrations, although failures are unavoidable during human data collection. Many existing approaches for exploiting failure data require additional data processing or iterative policy updates through autonomous rollouts, making it difficult to directly and stably utilize failure data accumulated during data collection. In this work, we propose a method that learns latent representations of success-failure discrepancies and incorporates them into the attention mechanism. During inference, an appropriate latent mode is selected from the initial observation to improve action stability. Furthermore, we introduce a post-training metric that quantifies the attention discrepancy between each failure sample and successful demonstrations to select failure data. Simulation results show that the proposed method improves task success rates when trained with failure data and that the proposed metric identifies failure samples that are beneficial for learning when combined with successful demonstrations. These results suggest that the proposed method can support more efficient use of collected demonstrations in robotic data collection pipelines.

Kana Miyamoto, Kanata Suzuki, Tetsuya Ogata

Faculty of Science and Engineering, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan · Physical AI Laboratory, Fujitsu Limited, Kanagawa, Japan

Imitation Learning Robotic Data Acquisition Alignment-Aware Selection Lateral String Stability

May 6, 2026cs.CV

Wasserstein-Aligned Localisation for VLM-Based Distributional OOD Detection in Medical Imaging

Zero-shot anomaly localisation via vision-language models (VLMs) offers a compelling approach for rare pathology detection, yet its performance is fundamentally limited by the absence of healthy anatomical context. We reformulate zero-shot localisation as a comparative inference problem in which anomalies are identified through structured comparison against reference distributions of normal anatomy. We introduce WALDO, a training-free framework grounded in optimal transport theory that enables comparative reasoning through: (i) entropy-weighted Sliced Wasserstein distances for anatomically-aware reference selection from DINOv2 patch distributions, (ii) Goldilocks zone sampling exploiting the non-monotonic relationship between reference similarity and localisation accuracy, and (iii) self-consistency aggregation via weighted non-maximum suppression. We theoretically analyse the Goldilocks effect through distributional divergence, and show that references with moderate similarity minimize a bias-variance trade-off in comparative visual reasoning. On the NOVA brain MRI benchmark, WALDO with Qwen2.5-VL-72B achieves

43.5_{\pm1.6}\%

mAP@30 (95% CI: [40.4, 46.7]), representing a 19% relative improvement over zero-shot baselines. Cross-model evaluation shows consistent gains: GPT-4o achieves

32.0_{\pm6.5}\%

and Qwen3-VL-32B achieves

32.0_{\pm6.6}\%

mAP@30. Paired McNemar tests confirm statistical significance (

p<0.01

). Source code is available at https://github.com/bkainz/WALDO_MICCAI26_demo .

Bernhard Kainz, Johanna P Mueller, Matthew Baugh +1

Dept. AIBE, Friedrich–Alexander University Erlangen–Nürnberg, DE · Department of Computing, Imperial College London, UK · Technical University Munich, DE +1

Medical Vision-Language Models Out-Of-Distribution Detection Medical Imaging Out-Of-Distribution Alignment-Aware Selection Divergence

May 6, 2026cond-mat.mtrl-sci

Building informative materials datasets beyond targeted objectives

Materials science data collection can be expensive, making the reuse and long-term utility of datasets critical important for future discovery campaigns. In practice, researchers prioritize a subset of properties due to research interests. However, ignoring a subset of outcomes in data collection campaigns potentially generate datasets poorly suited for future learning tasks. Here, we present a framework for dataset construction that maximizes informativeness for target properties of interest while preserving performance on untargeted ones. Our approach uses diversity-aware selection to ensure broad coverage of the materials space. In noisy experimental dataset construction, we find that without our diversity-aware framework, prediction performance on untargeted properties can degrade by up to 40% relative to random sampling, whereas applying our framework yields improvements of up to 10% . For targeted properties, performance can degrade with respect to random sampling by up to 12.5% without diversity, while our framework achieves gains of up to 25%. Incorporating diversity into dataset construction not only preserves informativeness for the targeted properties, but also improves materials coverage for potential future objectives. As a result, the constructed datasets remain broadly informative across considered and unconsidered outcomes, ensuring unbiased quality entries and mitigating cold-start limitations in subsequent modeling and discovery campaigns.

Rafael Espinosa Castañeda, Ashley Dale, Hongchen Wang +6

Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Toronto, Canada. · 4Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Toronto, Canada. · Department of Computer Science, Princeton University +2

Data-Driven Materials Discovery Materials Real-World Dataset Alignment-Aware Selection

Apr 28, 2026cs.CL

What Makes Good Instruction-Tuning Data? An In-Context Learning Perspective

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.

Guangzeng Han, Xiaolei Huang

University of Memphis

Instruction Tuning Multimodal Continual Instruction Tuning Alignment-Aware Selection In-Context Learning Instruction-Tuned Models Training Data