不依赖预训练模型,用小模型预测数据长期影响,高效选优质训练数据。
BLISS: A Lightweight Bilevel Influence Scoring Method for Data Selection in Language Model Pretraining
- 用小代理模型和评分模型估算样本长期影响,实现从零开始的数据筛选
- 在10亿参数模型上提速1.7倍,下游任务性能更优
- 适合大规模语言模型预训练中快速筛选高质量数据集
有效的数据选择对大语言模型(LLM)预训练至关重要,可提升效率并增强下游任务泛化能力。然而,现有方法常依赖外部预训练模型,难以区分数据选择与外部模型的影响;且通常忽略数据在模型收敛后的长期作用,因全规模LLM预训练成本过高。本文提出BLISS(Bilevel Influence Scoring for Data Selection):一种完全从零开始、不依赖任何外部预训练模型的轻量级数据选择方法,明确考虑样本的长期影响。BLISS使用小型代理模型作为LLM的替代,通过评分模型估计样本在代理模型收敛时的长期影响。将数据选择建模为双层优化问题:上层优化评分模型以分配样本重要性权重,使下层目标(即加权损失下训练代理模型至收敛)最小化时,能获得最优验证性能。优化后,评分模型可预测所有数据的影响力得分,从而高效筛选高质量样本用于LLM预训练。我们在C4数据集上对410M/1B/2.8B Pythia及LLaMA-0.5B模型进行验证。在10亿参数设置下,BLISS达到与最先进方法相同性能时提速1.7倍,且在多个下游任务中表现更优。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Effective data selection is essential for pretraining large language models (LLMs), enhancing efficiency and improving generalization to downstream tasks. However, existing approaches often require leveraging external pretrained models, making it difficult to disentangle the effects of data selection from those of the external pretrained models. In addition, they often overlook the long-term impact of selected data if the model is trained to convergence, primarily due to the prohibitive cost of full-scale LLM pretraining. In this paper, we introduce BLISS (\textbf{B}ileve\textbf{L} \textbf{I}nfluence \textbf{S}coring method for data \textbf{S}election): a lightweight data selection method that operates entirely \emph{from scratch}, without relying on any external pretrained oracle models, while explicitly accounting for the long-term impact of selected data. BLISS leverages a small proxy model as a surrogate for the LLM and employs a score model to estimate the long-term influence of training samples if the proxy model is trained to convergence. We formulate data selection as a bilevel optimization problem, where the upper-level objective optimizes the score model to assign importance weights to training samples, ensuring that minimizing the lower-level objective (i.e., training the proxy model over the weighted training loss until convergence) leads to best validation performance. Once optimized, the trained score model predicts influence scores for the dataset, enabling efficient selection of high-quality samples for LLM pretraining. We validate BLISS by pretraining 410M/1B/2.8B Pythia and LLaMA-0.5B models on selected subsets of the C4 dataset. Notably, under the 1B model setting, BLISS achieves $1.7\times$ speedup in reaching the same performance as the state-of-the-art method, demonstrating superior performance across multiple downstream tasks.
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