The training of large language models (LLMs) is expensive. In this paper, we study data-efficient approaches for pre-training LLMs, i.e., techniques that aim to optimize the Pareto frontier of model quality and training resource/data consumption. We seek to understand the tradeoffs associated with data selection routines based on (i) expensive-to-compute data-quality estimates, and (ii) maximization of coverage and diversity-based measures in the feature space. Our first technique, Ask-LLM, leverages the zero-shot reasoning capabilities of instruction-tuned LLMs to directly assess the quality of a training example. To target coverage, we propose Density sampling, which models the data distribution to select a diverse sample. In our comparison of 19 samplers, involving hundreds of evaluation tasks and pre-training runs, we find that Ask-LLM and Density are the best methods in their respective categories. Coverage sampling can recover the performance of the full data, while models trained on Ask-LLM data consistently outperform full-data training -- even when we reject 90% of the original dataset, while converging up to 70% faster.
@article{arxiv.2402.09668,
title = {How to Train Data-Efficient LLMs},
author = {Noveen Sachdeva and Benjamin Coleman and Wang-Cheng Kang and Jianmo Ni and Lichan Hong and Ed H. Chi and James Caverlee and Julian McAuley and Derek Zhiyuan Cheng},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.09668},
year = {2024}
}