Small Language Model as Data Prospector for Large Language Model

Abstract

The quality of instruction data directly affects the performance of fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs). Previously, li2023one proposed NUGGETS, which identifies and selects high-quality quality data from a large dataset by identifying those individual instruction examples that can significantly improve the performance of different tasks after being learnt as one-shot instances. In this work, we propose SuperNUGGETS, an improved variant of NUGGETS optimised for efficiency and performance. Our SuperNUGGETS uses a small language model (SLM) instead of a large language model (LLM) to filter the data for outstanding one-shot instances and refines the predefined set of tests. The experimental results show that the performance of SuperNUGGETS only decreases by 1-2% compared to NUGGETS, but the efficiency can be increased by a factor of 58. Compared to the original NUGGETS, our SuperNUGGETS has a higher utility value due to the significantly lower resource consumption.