{"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/take-the-bull-by-the-horns-hard-sample","title":"Take the Bull by the Horns: Hard Sample-Reweighted Continual Training Improves LLM Generalization","arxiv_id":"2402.14270","date":"2024-02-22","proceeding":null,"authors":["Xuxi Chen","Zhendong Wang","Daouda Sow","Junjie Yang","Tianlong Chen","Yingbin Liang","Mingyuan Zhou","Zhangyang Wang"],"abstract":"In the rapidly advancing arena of large language models (LLMs), a key challenge is to enhance their capabilities amid a looming shortage of high-quality training data. Our study starts from an empirical strategy for the light continual training of LLMs using their original pre-training data sets, with a specific focus on selective retention of samples that incur moderately high losses. These samples are deemed informative and beneficial for model refinement, contrasting with the highest-loss samples, which would be discarded due to their correlation with data noise and complexity. We then formalize this strategy into a principled framework of Instance-Reweighted Distributionally Robust Optimization (IR-DRO). IR-DRO is designed to dynamically prioritize the training focus on informative samples through an instance reweighting mechanism, streamlined by a closed-form solution for straightforward integration into established training protocols. Through rigorous experimentation with various models and datasets, our findings indicate that our sample-targeted methods significantly improve LLM performance across multiple benchmarks, in both continual pre-training and instruction tuning scenarios. Our codes are available at https://github.com/VITA-Group/HardFocusTraining.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.14270v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.14270v2.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":"take-the-bull-by-the-horns-hard-sample","repo_url":"https://github.com/vita-group/hardfocustraining","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[{"method_slug":"focus","method_name":"Focus"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2402.14270","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2402.14270","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2402.14270"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-25T09:33:49+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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