SkillRater: Untangling Capabilities in Multimodal Data

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Sahi, Naveen, Dohmann, Jeremy, Aghajanyan, Armen, Shrivastava, Akshat
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Sahi, Naveen
Dohmann, Jeremy
Aghajanyan, Armen
Shrivastava, Akshat
author_facet Sahi, Naveen
Dohmann, Jeremy
Aghajanyan, Armen
Shrivastava, Akshat
contents Data curation methods typically assign samples a single quality score. We argue this scalar framing is fundamentally limited: when training requires multiple distinct capabilities, a monolithic scorer cannot maximize useful signals for all of them simultaneously. Quality is better understood as multidimensional, with each dimension corresponding to a capability the model must acquire. We introduce SkillRater, a framework that decomposes data filtering into specialized raters - one per capability, each trained via meta-learning on a disjoint validation objective - and composes their scores through a progressive selection rule: at each training stage, a sample is retained if any rater ranks it above a threshold that tightens over time, preserving diversity early while concentrating on high-value samples late. We validate this approach on vision language models, decomposing quality into three capability dimensions: visual understanding, OCR, and STEM reasoning. At 2B parameters, SkillRater improves over unfiltered baselines by 5.63% on visual understanding, 2.00% on OCR, and 3.53% on STEM on held out benchmarks. The learned rater signals are near orthogonal, confirming that the decomposition captures genuinely independent quality dimensions and explaining why it outperforms both unfiltered training and monolithic learned filtering.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_11615
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SkillRater: Untangling Capabilities in Multimodal Data
Sahi, Naveen
Dohmann, Jeremy
Aghajanyan, Armen
Shrivastava, Akshat
Machine Learning
Data curation methods typically assign samples a single quality score. We argue this scalar framing is fundamentally limited: when training requires multiple distinct capabilities, a monolithic scorer cannot maximize useful signals for all of them simultaneously. Quality is better understood as multidimensional, with each dimension corresponding to a capability the model must acquire. We introduce SkillRater, a framework that decomposes data filtering into specialized raters - one per capability, each trained via meta-learning on a disjoint validation objective - and composes their scores through a progressive selection rule: at each training stage, a sample is retained if any rater ranks it above a threshold that tightens over time, preserving diversity early while concentrating on high-value samples late. We validate this approach on vision language models, decomposing quality into three capability dimensions: visual understanding, OCR, and STEM reasoning. At 2B parameters, SkillRater improves over unfiltered baselines by 5.63% on visual understanding, 2.00% on OCR, and 3.53% on STEM on held out benchmarks. The learned rater signals are near orthogonal, confirming that the decomposition captures genuinely independent quality dimensions and explaining why it outperforms both unfiltered training and monolithic learned filtering.
title SkillRater: Untangling Capabilities in Multimodal Data
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.11615