Accumulative SGD Influence Estimation for Data Attribution
Abstract
Modern data-centric AI needs precise per-sample influence. Standard SGD-IE approximates leave-one-out effects by summing per-epoch surrogates and ignores cross-epoch compounding, which misranks critical examples. We propose ACC-SGD-IE, a trajectory-aware estimator that propagates the leave-one-out perturbation across training and updates an accumulative influence state at each step. In smooth strongly convex settings it achieves geometric error contraction and, in smooth non-convex regimes, it tightens error bounds; larger mini-batches further reduce constants. Empirically, on Adult, 20 Newsgroups, and MNIST under clean and corrupted data and both convex and non-convex training, ACC-SGD-IE yields more accurate influence estimates, especially over long epochs. For downstream data cleansing it more reliably flags noisy samples, producing models trained on ACC-SGD-IE cleaned data that outperform those cleaned with SGD-IE.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2510.26185,
title = {Accumulative SGD Influence Estimation for Data Attribution},
author = {Yunxiao Shi and Shuo Yang and Yixin Su and Rui Zhang and Min Xu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.26185},
year = {2025}
}