Daunce: Data Attribution through Uncertainty Estimation

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Pan, Xingyuan, Ye, Chenlu, Melkonian, Joseph, Ma, Jiaqi W., Zhang, Tong
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866909626890452992
author Pan, Xingyuan
Ye, Chenlu
Melkonian, Joseph
Ma, Jiaqi W.
Zhang, Tong
author_facet Pan, Xingyuan
Ye, Chenlu
Melkonian, Joseph
Ma, Jiaqi W.
Zhang, Tong
contents Training data attribution (TDA) methods aim to identify which training examples influence a model's predictions on specific test data most. By quantifying these influences, TDA supports critical applications such as data debugging, curation, and valuation. Gradient-based TDA methods rely on gradients and second-order information, limiting their applicability at scale. While recent random projection-based methods improve scalability, they often suffer from degraded attribution accuracy. Motivated by connections between uncertainty and influence functions, we introduce Daunce - a simple yet effective data attribution approach through uncertainty estimation. Our method operates by fine-tuning a collection of perturbed models and computing the covariance of per-example losses across these models as the attribution score. Daunce is scalable to large language models (LLMs) and achieves more accurate attribution compared to existing TDA methods. We validate Daunce on tasks ranging from vision tasks to LLM fine-tuning, and further demonstrate its compatibility with black-box model access. Applied to OpenAI's GPT models, our method achieves, to our knowledge, the first instance of data attribution on proprietary LLMs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_23223
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Daunce: Data Attribution through Uncertainty Estimation
Pan, Xingyuan
Ye, Chenlu
Melkonian, Joseph
Ma, Jiaqi W.
Zhang, Tong
Machine Learning
Training data attribution (TDA) methods aim to identify which training examples influence a model's predictions on specific test data most. By quantifying these influences, TDA supports critical applications such as data debugging, curation, and valuation. Gradient-based TDA methods rely on gradients and second-order information, limiting their applicability at scale. While recent random projection-based methods improve scalability, they often suffer from degraded attribution accuracy. Motivated by connections between uncertainty and influence functions, we introduce Daunce - a simple yet effective data attribution approach through uncertainty estimation. Our method operates by fine-tuning a collection of perturbed models and computing the covariance of per-example losses across these models as the attribution score. Daunce is scalable to large language models (LLMs) and achieves more accurate attribution compared to existing TDA methods. We validate Daunce on tasks ranging from vision tasks to LLM fine-tuning, and further demonstrate its compatibility with black-box model access. Applied to OpenAI's GPT models, our method achieves, to our knowledge, the first instance of data attribution on proprietary LLMs.
title Daunce: Data Attribution through Uncertainty Estimation
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.23223