LASER: Stratified Selective Sampling for Instruction Tuning with Dedicated Scoring Strategy

TL;DR

This paper introduces LASER, a multi-step, efficient data selection pipeline for instruction tuning of large language models, balancing quality, difficulty, and diversity to enable high-performance fine-tuning with minimal computational overhead.

Contribution

LASER presents a novel, universal data selection method combining binning, quality estimation, and difficulty scoring for effective instruction tuning.

Findings

Efficient data binning and scoring improve fine-tuning performance.

Task-based categorization enables controlled data composition.

High-quality models are achieved with minimal computational costs.

Abstract

Recent work shows that post-training datasets for LLMs can be substantially downsampled without noticeably deteriorating performance. However, data selection often incurs high computational costs or is limited to narrow domains. In this paper, we demonstrate that data selection can be both -- efficient and universal -- by using a multi-step pipeline in which we efficiently bin data points into groups, estimate quality using specialized models, and score difficulty with a robust, lightweight method. Task-based categorization allows us to control the composition of our final data -- crucial for finetuning multi-purpose models. To guarantee diversity, we improve upon previous work using embedding models and a clustering algorithm. This integrated strategy enables high-performance fine-tuning with minimal overhead.