{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/predictive-data-selection-the-data-that","title":"Predictive Data Selection: The Data That Predicts Is the Data That Teaches","arxiv_id":"2503.00808","date":"2025-03-02","proceeding":null,"authors":["Kashun Shum","Yuzhen Huang","Hongjian Zou","Ding Qi","Yixuan Liao","Xiaoxin Chen","Qian Liu","Junxian He"],"abstract":"Language model pretraining involves training on extensive corpora, where data quality plays a pivotal role. In this work, we aim to directly estimate the contribution of data during pretraining and select pretraining data in an efficient manner. Specifically, we draw inspiration from recent findings showing that compression efficiency (i.e., the normalized loss) of diverse models on certain text correlates strongly with their downstream performance, when the text domain aligns with the downstream benchmark (Huang et al., 2024). Building on this observation, we hypothesize that data on which model losses are predictive of downstream abilities also contribute effectively to learning. To leverage this insight, we introduce data selection based on data's Predictive strength (Preselect), a lightweight and efficient data selection method that requires training and deploying only a fastText-based scorer. Through comprehensive experiments with 1B and 3B parameter models, we demonstrate that models trained on 30B tokens selected with PreSelect surpasses the performance of a vanilla baseline trained on 300B tokens, achieving a 10x reduction in compute requirements. Furthermore, PreSelect significantly outperforms other competitive data selection baselines, such as DCLM and FineWeb-Edu on a scale of 3B models trained on 100B tokens. We open-source our trained data selection scorer along with the curated datasets at https://github.com/hkust-nlp/PreSelect.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.00808v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.00808v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"predictive-data-selection-the-data-that","repo_url":"https://github.com/hkust-nlp/preselect","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2503.00808","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2503.00808"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. 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