GIST: Targeted Data Selection for Instruction Tuning via Coupled Optimization Geometry
Targeted data selection has emerged as a crucial paradigm for efficient instruction tuning, aiming to identify a small yet influential subset of training examples for a specific target task. In practice, influence is often measured through the effect of an example on parameter updates. To make selection scalable, many approaches leverage optimizer statistics (e.g., Adam states) as an axis-aligned surrogate for update geometry (i.e., diagonal precondition), implicitly treating parameters as coordinate-wise independent. We show that this assumption breaks down in parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods such as LoRA. In this setting, the induced optimization geometry exhibits strong cross-parameter coupling with non-trivial off-diagonal interactions, while the task-relevant update directions are confined to a low-dimensional subspace. Motivated by this mismatch, we propose GIST (Gradient Isometric Subspace Transformation), a simple yet principled alternative that replaces axis-aligned scaling with robust subspace alignment. GIST recovers a task-specific subspace from validation gradients via singular value decomposition (SVD), projects training gradients into this coupled subspace, and scores examples by their alignment with target directions. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that GIST matches or outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline with only 0.29% of the storage and 25% of the computational time under the same selection budget.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
parameter-efficient fine-tuningSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
A Critical Look at Targeted Instruction Selection: Disentangling What Matters (and What Doesn't)
Instruction fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) often involves selecting a subset of instruction training data from a large candidate pool, using a small query set from the target task. Despite growing interest, …
Concepts or Skills? Rethinking Instruction Selection for Multi-modal Models
Vision-language instruction tuning achieves two main purposes: learning visual concepts and learning visual skills. In this paper, we found that vision-language benchmarks fall into the dichotomy of mainly benefiting fro…
Let the Target Select for Itself: Data Selection via Target-Aligned Paths
Targeted data selection aims to identify training samples from a large candidate pool that improve performance on a specific downstream task. Many recent methods estimate candidate utility by aggregating local attributio…
LESS: Selecting Influential Data for Targeted Instruction Tuning
Instruction tuning has unlocked powerful capabilities in large language models (LLMs), effectively using combined datasets to develop generalpurpose chatbots. However, real-world applications often require a specialized …
ProDS: Preference-oriented Data Selection for Instruction Tuning
Instruction data selection aims to identify a high-quality subset from the training set that matches or exceeds the performance of the full dataset on target tasks. Existing methods focus on the instruction-to-response m…
Response Generation