Data Valuation using Neural Networks for Efficient Instruction
  Fine-Tuning
Authors: name: Ishika Agarwal; name: Dilek Hakkani-Tür
Published: 2025-02-14 07:55:47

Abstract: Influence functions provide crucial insights into model training, but
existing methods suffer from large computational costs and limited
generalization. Particularly, recent works have proposed various metrics and
algorithms to calculate the influence of data using language models, which do
not scale well with large models and datasets. This is because of the expensive
forward and backward passes required for computation, substantial memory
requirements to store large models, and poor generalization of influence
estimates to new data. In this paper, we explore the use of small neural
networks -- which we refer to as the InfluenceNetwork -- to estimate influence
values, achieving up to 99% cost reduction. Our evaluation demonstrates that
influence values can be estimated with models just 0.0027% the size of full
language models (we use 7B and 8B versions). We apply our algorithm of
estimating influence values (called NN-CIFT: Neural Networks for effiCient
Instruction Fine-Tuning) to the downstream task of subset selection for general
instruction fine-tuning. In our study, we include four state-of-the-art
influence functions and show no compromise in performance, despite large
speedups, between NN-CIFT and the original influence functions. We provide an
in-depth hyperparameter analyses of NN-CIFT. The code for our method can be
found here: https://github.com/agarwalishika/NN-CIFT.