{"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/truth-in-the-few-high-value-data-selection","title":"Truth in the Few: High-Value Data Selection for Efficient Multi-Modal Reasoning","arxiv_id":"2506.04755","date":"2025-06-05","proceeding":null,"authors":["Shenshen Li","Kaiyuan Deng","Lei Wang","Hao Yang","Chong Peng","Peng Yan","Fumin Shen","Heng Tao Shen","Xing Xu"],"abstract":"While multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have made significant progress in complex reasoning tasks via reinforcement learning, it is commonly believed that extensive training data is necessary for improving multi-modal reasoning ability, inevitably leading to data redundancy and substantial computational costs. However, can smaller high-value datasets match or outperform full corpora for multi-modal reasoning in MLLMs? In this work, we challenge this assumption through a key observation: meaningful multi-modal reasoning is triggered by only a sparse subset of training samples, termed cognitive samples, whereas the majority contribute marginally. Building on this insight, we propose a novel data selection paradigm termed Reasoning Activation Potential (RAP), which identifies cognitive samples by estimating each sample's potential to stimulate genuine multi-modal reasoning by two complementary estimators: 1) Causal Discrepancy Estimator (CDE) based on the potential outcome model principle, eliminates samples that overly rely on language priors by comparing outputs between multi-modal and text-only inputs; 2) Attention Confidence Estimator (ACE), which exploits token-level self-attention to discard samples dominated by irrelevant but over-emphasized tokens in intermediate reasoning stages. Moreover, we introduce a Difficulty-aware Replacement Module (DRM) to substitute trivial instances with cognitively challenging ones, thereby ensuring complexity for robust multi-modal reasoning. Experiments on six datasets show that our RAP method consistently achieves superior performance using only 9.3% of the training data, while reducing computational costs by over 43%. Our code is available at https://github.com/Leo-ssl/RAP.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04755v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.04755v1.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":"truth-in-the-few-high-value-data-selection","repo_url":"https://github.com/leo-ssl/rap","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[],"methods":[{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2506.04755","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2506.04755","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}