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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Deng, Wenlong, Zeng, Qi, Zhang, Jiaming, Chen, Minghui, Ding, Zixin, Thrampoulidis, Christos, Gong, Boying, Li, Xiaoxiao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10180
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Table of Contents:
  • Data valuation is essential for enhancing the transparency and accountability of large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs). However, existing methods typically rely on gradient computations, making them computationally prohibitive for billion-parameter models and precluding batch parallelization. In this work, we introduce For-Value, a forward-only data valuation framework that enables efficient batch-scalable value estimation while maintaining effectiveness. Leveraging the expressive power of pretrained LLMs/VLMs, we theoretically demonstrate that data valuation can be captured by the alignment between the final hidden representations and prediction errors at the last layer. In light of this insight, For-Value computes data value using a simple closed-form expression with a single forward pass, eliminating the need for costly backpropagation and enabling efficient batch calculating at scale. Extensive experiments show that For-Value matches or outperforms gradient-based baselines in detecting influential data and mislabeled data, while achieving significant efficiency improvements.