Diversify and Conquer: Diversity-Centric Data Selection with Iterative Refinement

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Yu, Simon, Chen, Liangyu, Ahmadian, Sara, Fadaee, Marzieh
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866913504650330112
author Yu, Simon
Chen, Liangyu
Ahmadian, Sara
Fadaee, Marzieh
author_facet Yu, Simon
Chen, Liangyu
Ahmadian, Sara
Fadaee, Marzieh
contents Finetuning large language models on instruction data is crucial for enhancing pre-trained knowledge and improving instruction-following capabilities. As instruction datasets proliferate, selecting optimal data for effective training becomes increasingly important. This work addresses the question: How can we determine the optimal subset of data for effective training? While existing research often emphasizes local criteria like instance quality for subset selection, we argue that a global approach focused on data diversity is more critical. Our method employs k-means clustering to ensure the selected subset effectively represents the full dataset. We propose an iterative refinement method inspired by active learning techniques to resample instances from clusters, reassessing each cluster's importance and sampling weight in every training iteration. This approach reduces the effect of outliers and automatically filters out clusters containing low-quality data. Through extensive evaluation across natural language reasoning, general world knowledge, code and math reasoning tasks, and by fine-tuning models from various families, we observe consistent improvements, achieving a 7% increase over random selection and a 3.8% improvement over state-of-the-art sampling methods. Our work highlights the significance of diversity-first sampling when finetuning LLMs to enhance performance across a broad array of evaluation tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/for-ai/iterative-data-selection.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_11378
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Diversify and Conquer: Diversity-Centric Data Selection with Iterative Refinement
Yu, Simon
Chen, Liangyu
Ahmadian, Sara
Fadaee, Marzieh
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Finetuning large language models on instruction data is crucial for enhancing pre-trained knowledge and improving instruction-following capabilities. As instruction datasets proliferate, selecting optimal data for effective training becomes increasingly important. This work addresses the question: How can we determine the optimal subset of data for effective training? While existing research often emphasizes local criteria like instance quality for subset selection, we argue that a global approach focused on data diversity is more critical. Our method employs k-means clustering to ensure the selected subset effectively represents the full dataset. We propose an iterative refinement method inspired by active learning techniques to resample instances from clusters, reassessing each cluster's importance and sampling weight in every training iteration. This approach reduces the effect of outliers and automatically filters out clusters containing low-quality data. Through extensive evaluation across natural language reasoning, general world knowledge, code and math reasoning tasks, and by fine-tuning models from various families, we observe consistent improvements, achieving a 7% increase over random selection and a 3.8% improvement over state-of-the-art sampling methods. Our work highlights the significance of diversity-first sampling when finetuning LLMs to enhance performance across a broad array of evaluation tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/for-ai/iterative-data-selection.
title Diversify and Conquer: Diversity-Centric Data Selection with Iterative Refinement
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.11378