Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Jiao, Cathy, Gao, Gary, Raghunathan, Aditi, Xiong, Chenyan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.12259
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866913685600993280
author Jiao, Cathy
Gao, Gary
Raghunathan, Aditi
Xiong, Chenyan
author_facet Jiao, Cathy
Gao, Gary
Raghunathan, Aditi
Xiong, Chenyan
contents Data attribution methods are used to measure the contribution of training data towards model outputs, and have several important applications in areas such as dataset curation and model interpretability. However, many standard data attribution methods, such as influence functions, utilize model gradients and are computationally expensive. In our paper, we show in-context probing (ICP) -- prompting a LLM -- can serve as a fast proxy for gradient-based data attribution for data selection under conditions contingent on data similarity. We study this connection empirically on standard NLP tasks, and show that ICP and gradient-based data attribution are well-correlated in identifying influential training data for tasks that share similar task type and content as the training data. Additionally, fine-tuning models on influential data selected by both methods achieves comparable downstream performance, further emphasizing their similarities. We also examine the connection between ICP and gradient-based data attribution using synthetic data on linear regression tasks. Our synthetic data experiments show similar results with those from NLP tasks, suggesting that this connection can be isolated in simpler settings, which offers a pathway to bridging their differences.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_12259
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On the Feasibility of In-Context Probing for Data Attribution
Jiao, Cathy
Gao, Gary
Raghunathan, Aditi
Xiong, Chenyan
Computation and Language
Data attribution methods are used to measure the contribution of training data towards model outputs, and have several important applications in areas such as dataset curation and model interpretability. However, many standard data attribution methods, such as influence functions, utilize model gradients and are computationally expensive. In our paper, we show in-context probing (ICP) -- prompting a LLM -- can serve as a fast proxy for gradient-based data attribution for data selection under conditions contingent on data similarity. We study this connection empirically on standard NLP tasks, and show that ICP and gradient-based data attribution are well-correlated in identifying influential training data for tasks that share similar task type and content as the training data. Additionally, fine-tuning models on influential data selected by both methods achieves comparable downstream performance, further emphasizing their similarities. We also examine the connection between ICP and gradient-based data attribution using synthetic data on linear regression tasks. Our synthetic data experiments show similar results with those from NLP tasks, suggesting that this connection can be isolated in simpler settings, which offers a pathway to bridging their differences.
title On the Feasibility of In-Context Probing for Data Attribution
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.12259