How to Train Data-Efficient LLMs
Noveen Sachdeva Benjamin Coleman Wang-Cheng Kang Jianmo Ni Lichan Hong Ed H. Chi James Caverlee Julian McAuley Derek Zhiyuan Cheng
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.