Critical Learning Periods: Leveraging Early Training Dynamics for Efficient Data Pruning

Everlyn Chimoto, Jay Gala, Orevaoghene Ahia, Julia Kreutzer, Bruce Bassett, Sara Hooker


Abstract
Neural Machine Translation models are extremely data and compute-hungry. However, not all datapoints contribute equally to model training and generalization. Data pruning to remove the low-value data points has the benefit of drastically reducing the compute budget without significantdrop in model performance. In this paper, we propose a new data pruning technique: CheckpointsAcross Time (CAT ), that leverages early model training dynamics to identify the most relevantdata points for model performance. We benchmark CAT against several data pruning techniquesincluding COMET-QE, LASER and LaBSE. We find that CAT outperforms the benchmarks onIndo-European languages on multiple test sets. When applied to English-German, English-Frenchand English-Swahili translation tasks, CAT achieves comparable performance to using the fulldataset, while pruning up to 50% of training data. We inspect the data points that CAT selectsand find that it tends to favour longer sentences and sentences with unique or rare words.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.560
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9407–9426
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.560
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.560
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Everlyn Chimoto, Jay Gala, Orevaoghene Ahia, Julia Kreutzer, Bruce Bassett, and Sara Hooker. 2024. Critical Learning Periods: Leveraging Early Training Dynamics for Efficient Data Pruning. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024, pages 9407–9426, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Critical Learning Periods: Leveraging Early Training Dynamics for Efficient Data Pruning (Chimoto et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.560.pdf