Uncertainty-Aware Gradient Signal-to-Noise Data Selection for Instruction Tuning
Instruction tuning is a standard paradigm for adapting large language models (LLMs), but modern instruction datasets are large, noisy, and redundant, making full-data fine-tuning costly and often unnecessary. Existing data selection methods either build expensive gradient datastores or assign static scores from a weak proxy, largely ignoring evolving uncertainty, and thus missing a key source of LLM interpretability. We propose GRADFILTERING, an objective-agnostic, uncertainty-aware data selection framework that utilizes a small GPT-2 proxy with a LoRA ensemble and aggregates per-example gradients into a Gradient Signal-to-Noise Ratio (G-SNR) utility. Our method matches or surpasses random subsets and strong baselines in most LLM-as-a-judge evaluations as well as in human assessment. Moreover, GRADFILTERING-selected subsets converge faster than competitive filters under the same compute budget, reflecting the benefit of uncertainty-aware scoring.
6970e353572de08d9c7ae90d
Zhihang Yuan
6970e353572de08d9c7ae90e
Chengyu Yue
6970e353572de08d9c7ae90f
Long Huang
6970e353572de08d9c7ae910
Litu Ou
6970e353572de08d9c7ae911
Lei Shi
Uncertainty-Aware Gradient Signal-to-Noise Data Selection for Instruction Tuning
Instruction tuning is a standard paradigm for adapting large language models (LLMs), but modern instruction datasets are large, noisy, and redundant, making full-data fine-tuning costly and often unnecessary. Existing data selection methods either build expensive gradient datastores or assign static scores from a weak proxy, largely ignoring evolving uncertainty, and thus missing a key source of LLM interpretability. We propose GRADFILTERING, an objective-agnostic, uncertainty-aware data selection framework that utilizes a small GPT-2 proxy with a LoRA ensemble and aggregates per-example gradients into a Gradient Signal-to-Noise Ratio (G-SNR) utility. Our method matches or surpasses random subsets and strong baselines in most LLM-as-a-judge evaluations as well as in human assessment. Moreover, GRADFILTERING-selected subsets converge faster than competitive filters under the same compute budget, reflecting the benefit of uncertainty-aware scoring.
GRADFILTERING is an uncertainty-aware data selection framework for instruction tuning that uses gradient signal-to-noise ratio to improve LLM adaptation efficiency and performance.
instruction tuning large language models data selection gradient datastore LoRA ensemble Gradient Signal-to-Noise Ratio G-SNR uncertainty-aware scoring objective-agnostic LLM-as-a-judge evaluations