Guiding LLM Post-training Data Engineering with Model Internals from Sparse Autoencoders
Model internals encode rich information about how a large language model (LLM) processes its training data; however, post-training data engineering largely relies on external signals and ignores rich intrinsic signals lying in model internals. We propose SAERL, a data engineering framework for LLM reinforcement learning (RL). It models three intrinsic data properties: diversity, difficulty, and quality, using model internals extracted with Sparse Autoencoder (SAE), an advanced mechanistic interpretability tool. Each property grounds a concrete data engineering operation: SAE-space clustering with moderate batch mixing for batch diversity control, a difficulty proxy for easy-to-hard curriculum ordering, and a quality probe for data filtering. SAERL improves average accuracy by 3.00% over vanilla GRPO and reaches target accuracy with 20% fewer training steps on Qwen2.5-Math-1.5B, with consistent gains across model scales and RL algorithms. Experiments show that SAE transfers effectively across model families and scales, serving as a lightweight and reusable data engineering tool. These results demonstrate that model internals are a powerful and practical source of signals for post-training data engineering.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
Reinforcement LearningSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Guiding CTC Posterior Spike Timings for Improved Posterior Fusion and Knowledge Distillation
Conventional automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems trained from frame-level alignments can easily leverage posterior fusion to improve ASR accuracy and build a better single model with knowledge distillation. End-to…
Automatic Speech RecognitionAutomatic Speech Recognition (ASR)Data AugmentationDecoder+5Improving DBMS Scheduling Decisions with Fine-grained Performance Prediction on Concurrent Queries -- Extended
Query scheduling is a critical task that directly impacts query performance in database management systems (DBMS). Deeply integrated schedulers, which require changes to DBMS internals, are usually customized for a speci…
SchedulingTowards a unified and verified understanding of group-operation networks
A recent line of work in mechanistic interpretability has focused on reverse-engineering the computation performed by neural networks trained on the binary operation of finite groups. We investigate the internals of one-…
Zero-shot Translation of Attention Patterns in VQA Models to Natural Language
Converting a model's internals to text can yield human-understandable insights about the model. Inspired by the recent success of training-free approaches for image captioning, we propose ZS-A2T, a zero-shot framework th…
Image CaptioningLanguage ModelingLanguage ModellingLarge Language Model+3Closing the Data Loop: Using OpenDataArena to Engineer Superior Training Datasets
The construction of Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) datasets is a critical yet under-theorized stage in the post-training of Large Language Models (LLMs), as prevalent practices often rely on heuristic aggregation without a…