arXiv:2510.13212cs.LG2025-10中稿 · ICLR被引 6

提出新方法评估偏好数据价值,发现好数据因模型而异,可更精准选数据提升对齐效果。

Towards Understanding Valuable Preference Data for Large Language Model Alignment

  • 用截断影响函数衡量每条数据对验证集的影响,避免传统方法误判。
  • 发现优质数据依赖具体模型,同一数据对不同模型可能有益或有害。
  • 设计简单组合评分规则,用更少数据实现更好对齐,适配各类大模型。

大语言模型对齐通常依赖人类偏好比较数据,其质量至关重要。现有方法多用外部奖励模型或现成LLM预处理数据以筛选优质偏好对,虽提升整体性能,却很少检验单个数据点是否真正有效。本文提出截断影响函数(TIF),通过评估数据对验证集的个体影响来衡量质量,缓解传统方法的过评分问题,并揭示偏好数据质量本质上是模型相关的:同一数据对一个模型有益,可能对另一个有害。这表明需针对特定模型优化数据选择策略。为此,我们设计两种计算更简单的候选评分函数(SFs),与TIF正相关且具模型依赖性,可作为数据质量指标。同时发现这些SFs存在固有误差,因此将它们组合以抵消不同误差源,形成简单有效的数据选择规则。在多个对齐基准和多种大模型家族上实验显示,使用更少数据即可获得更好对齐性能,验证了方法的通用性。代码已开源。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Large language model (LLM) alignment is typically achieved through learning from human preference comparisons, making the quality of preference data critical to its success. Existing studies often pre-process raw training datasets to identify valuable preference pairs using external reward models or off-the-shelf LLMs, achieving improved overall performance but rarely examining whether individual, selected data point is genuinely beneficial. We assess data quality through individual influence on validation data using our newly proposed truncated influence function (TIF), which mitigates the over-scoring present in traditional measures and reveals that preference data quality is inherently a property of the model. In other words, a data pair that benefits one model may harm another. This leaves the need to improve the preference data selection approaches to be adapting to specific models. To this end, we introduce two candidate scoring functions (SFs) that are computationally simpler than TIF and positively correlated with it. They are also model dependent and can serve as potential indicators of individual data quality for preference data selection. Furthermore, we observe that these SFs inherently exhibit errors when compared to TIF. To this end, we combine them to offset their diverse error sources, resulting in a simple yet effective data selection rule that enables the models to achieve a more precise selection of valuable preference data. We conduct experiments across diverse alignment benchmarks and various LLM families, with results demonstrating that better alignment performance can be achieved using less data, showing the generality of our findings and new methods. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/tmlr-group/TIF_LossDiff-IRM.

模型对齐数据筛选影响力分析

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