Farewell to Aimless Large-scale Pretraining: Influential Subset
  Selection for Language Model
Xiao Wang Weikang Zhou Qi Zhang Jie Zhou Songyang Gao Junzhe Wang Menghan Zhang Xiang Gao Yunwen Chen Tao Gui
Pretrained language models have achieved remarkable success in various
natural language processing tasks. However, pretraining has recently shifted
toward larger models and larger data, and this has resulted in significant
computational and energy costs. In this paper, we propose Influence Subset
Selection (ISS) for language model, which explicitly utilizes end-task
knowledge to select a tiny subset of the pretraining corpus. Specifically, the
ISS selects the samples that will provide the most positive influence on the
performance of the end-task. Furthermore, we design a gradient matching based
influence estimation method, which can drastically reduce the computation time
of influence. With only 0.45% of the data and a three-orders-of-magnitude lower
computational cost, ISS outperformed pretrained models (e.g., RoBERTa) on eight
datasets covering four domains.