LASER: Stratified Selective Sampling for Instruction Tuning with Dedicated Scoring Strategy
This work provides an incremental improvement for researchers and practitioners in NLP by making data selection more efficient and universal.
The paper tackles the problem of efficiently selecting high-quality, diverse data for instruction tuning of LLMs, achieving strong performance with minimal computational overhead.
Recent work shows that post-training datasets for LLMs can be substantially downsampled without noticeably deteriorating performance. However, data selection often incurs high computational costs or is limited to narrow domains. In this paper, we demonstrate that data selection can be both -- efficient and universal -- by using a multi-step pipeline in which we efficiently bin data points into groups, estimate quality using specialized models, and score difficulty with a robust, lightweight method. Task-based categorization allows us to control the composition of our final data -- crucial for finetuning multi-purpose models. To guarantee diversity, we improve upon previous work using embedding models and a clustering algorithm. This integrated strategy enables high-performance fine-tuning with minimal overhead.