Papers › GPT-4o as the Gold Standard: A Scalable and General Purpose Approach to Filter...
GPT-4o as the Gold Standard: A Scalable and General Purpose Approach to Filter Language Model Pretraining Data
Jifan Zhang, Ziyue Luo, Jia Liu, Ness Shroff, Robert Nowak
Large language models require vast amounts of high-quality training data, but effective filtering of web-scale datasets remains a significant challenge. This paper demonstrates that GPT-4o is remarkably effective at identifying high-quality training data, but its prohibitive cost makes it impractical at web-scale. We propose SIEVE, a lightweight alternative that matches GPT-4o accuracy at less than 1% of the cost. SIEVE can perform up to 500 filtering operations for the cost of one GPT-4o filtering call. The key to SIEVE is a seamless integration of GPT-4o and lightweight text classification models, using active learning to fine-tune these models in the background with a small number of calls to GPT-4o. Once trained, it performs as well as GPT-4o at a tiny fraction of the cost. Through different filtering prompts, SIEVE can efficiently curate high quality data for general or specialized domains from web-scale corpora -- a valuable capability given the current scarcity of high-quality domain-specific datasets. Extensive experiments using automatic and human evaluation metrics show that SIEVE and GPT-4o achieve similar performance on five highly specific filtering prompts. In addition, when performing quality filtering on web crawl datasets, we demonstrate SIEVE can further improve over state-of-the-art quality filtering methods in the DataComp-LM challenge for selecting LLM pretraining data.
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Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Multi-task Language Understanding | MML | GPT-4 o1(300b) | Average (%) | 87 | #1 of 44 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Question Answering | NewsQA | OpenAI/GPT-4o | EM | 70.21 | #9 of 18 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Question Answering | NewsQA | OpenAI/GPT-4o | F1 | 81.74 | #9 of 18 | Archive leaderboard | report |
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Methods
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