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Main Authors: Li, Ming, Zhang, Yong, He, Shwai, Li, Zhitao, Zhao, Hongyu, Wang, Jianzong, Cheng, Ning, Zhou, Tianyi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.00530
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author Li, Ming
Zhang, Yong
He, Shwai
Li, Zhitao
Zhao, Hongyu
Wang, Jianzong
Cheng, Ning
Zhou, Tianyi
author_facet Li, Ming
Zhang, Yong
He, Shwai
Li, Zhitao
Zhao, Hongyu
Wang, Jianzong
Cheng, Ning
Zhou, Tianyi
contents Instruction tuning is critical to improve LLMs but usually suffers from low-quality and redundant data. Data filtering for instruction tuning has proved important in improving both the efficiency and performance of the tuning process. But it also leads to extra cost and computation due to the involvement of LLMs in this process. To reduce the filtering cost, we study Superfiltering: Can we use a smaller and weaker model to select data for finetuning a larger and stronger model? Despite the performance gap between weak and strong language models, we find their highly consistent capability to perceive instruction difficulty and data selection results. This enables us to use a much smaller and more efficient model to filter the instruction data used to train a larger language model. Not only does it largely speed up the data filtering, but the filtered-data-finetuned LLM achieves even better performance on standard benchmarks. Extensive experiments validate the efficacy and efficiency of our approach.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_00530
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Superfiltering: Weak-to-Strong Data Filtering for Fast Instruction-Tuning
Li, Ming
Zhang, Yong
He, Shwai
Li, Zhitao
Zhao, Hongyu
Wang, Jianzong
Cheng, Ning
Zhou, Tianyi
Computation and Language
Instruction tuning is critical to improve LLMs but usually suffers from low-quality and redundant data. Data filtering for instruction tuning has proved important in improving both the efficiency and performance of the tuning process. But it also leads to extra cost and computation due to the involvement of LLMs in this process. To reduce the filtering cost, we study Superfiltering: Can we use a smaller and weaker model to select data for finetuning a larger and stronger model? Despite the performance gap between weak and strong language models, we find their highly consistent capability to perceive instruction difficulty and data selection results. This enables us to use a much smaller and more efficient model to filter the instruction data used to train a larger language model. Not only does it largely speed up the data filtering, but the filtered-data-finetuned LLM achieves even better performance on standard benchmarks. Extensive experiments validate the efficacy and efficiency of our approach.
title Superfiltering: Weak-to-Strong Data Filtering for Fast Instruction-Tuning
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.00530