Accelerate Scaling of LLM Finetuning via Quantifying the Coverage and Depth of Instruction Set

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Wu, Chengwei, Du, Li, Zhao, Hanyu, Ju, Yiming, Wang, Jiapu, Chen, Tianyu, Zhou, Haoyi
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866908616536096768
author Wu, Chengwei
Du, Li
Zhao, Hanyu
Ju, Yiming
Wang, Jiapu
Chen, Tianyu
Zhou, Haoyi
author_facet Wu, Chengwei
Du, Li
Zhao, Hanyu
Ju, Yiming
Wang, Jiapu
Chen, Tianyu
Zhou, Haoyi
contents Scaling the amount of data used for supervied fine-tuning(SFT) does not guarantee the proportional gains in model performance, highlighting a critical need to understand what makes training samples effective. This work identifies two fundamental dataset properties that govern SFT scalability: \textbf{semantic coverage}, or the breadth of task domains, and \textbf{information depth}, or the richness of individual examples. We demonstrate that simple proxies for these properties explain the majority of validation loss variance in our experiments. In this work, we further propose the \textbf{Information Landscape Approximation (ILA)}, a model-agnostic data selection framework that jointly optimizes for these two factors. ILA constructs compact subsets that approximate the informational value of large datasets. Empirical results show that models tuned on ILA-selected data achieve faster and more sustained performance improvements across diverse tasks and model sizes compared to existing methods, a phenomenon we term \textbf{accelerated scaling}.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_06463
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Accelerate Scaling of LLM Finetuning via Quantifying the Coverage and Depth of Instruction Set
Wu, Chengwei
Du, Li
Zhao, Hanyu
Ju, Yiming
Wang, Jiapu
Chen, Tianyu
Zhou, Haoyi
Artificial Intelligence
Scaling the amount of data used for supervied fine-tuning(SFT) does not guarantee the proportional gains in model performance, highlighting a critical need to understand what makes training samples effective. This work identifies two fundamental dataset properties that govern SFT scalability: \textbf{semantic coverage}, or the breadth of task domains, and \textbf{information depth}, or the richness of individual examples. We demonstrate that simple proxies for these properties explain the majority of validation loss variance in our experiments. In this work, we further propose the \textbf{Information Landscape Approximation (ILA)}, a model-agnostic data selection framework that jointly optimizes for these two factors. ILA constructs compact subsets that approximate the informational value of large datasets. Empirical results show that models tuned on ILA-selected data achieve faster and more sustained performance improvements across diverse tasks and model sizes compared to existing methods, a phenomenon we term \textbf{accelerated scaling}.
title Accelerate Scaling of LLM Finetuning via Quantifying the Coverage and Depth of Instruction Set
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06463