@inproceedings{zhou-etal-2025-davir,
title = "{D}av{IR}: Data Selection via Implicit Reward for Large Language Models",
author = "Zhou, Haotian and
Liu, Tingkai and
Ma, Qianli and
Zhang, Yufeng and
Yuan, Jianbo and
Liu, Pengfei and
You, Yang and
Yang, Hongxia",
editor = "Che, Wanxiang and
Nabende, Joyce and
Shutova, Ekaterina and
Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2025",
address = "Vienna, Austria",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.452/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.452",
pages = "9220--9237",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-251-0",
abstract = "We introduce DavIR, a model-based data selection method for post-training Large Language Models. DavIR generalizes Reducible Holdout Loss to core-set selection problem of causal language modeling, and quantifies the learnability of a given datum with respect to a pre-trained LLM based on relative reduction in loss during fine-tuning, a metric we show to be closely related to the implicit reward model described in Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). We show that 6{\%} of Alpaca dataset selected with DavIR can steer both the LLaMA and Gemma model family to produce superior performance compared to the same models trained on the full 52K dataset. We also show that Alpaca dataset compressed with DavIR can be combined with GSM8K dataset to effectively balance open-domain freeform QA and mathematical reasoning capabilities. Finally, we apply the DavIR objective to DPO and develop a normalized DavIR-DPO objective which improves alignment performance of Zephyr-7B-SFT model by 8{\%} (relative) on AlpacaEval, compared against training on vanilla DPO objective."
}<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modsCollection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
<mods ID="zhou-etal-2025-davir">
<titleInfo>
<title>DavIR: Data Selection via Implicit Reward for Large Language Models</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Haotian</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Zhou</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Tingkai</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Liu</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Qianli</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Ma</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Yufeng</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Zhang</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Jianbo</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Yuan</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Pengfei</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Liu</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Yang</namePart>
<namePart type="family">You</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Hongxia</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Yang</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<dateIssued>2025-07</dateIssued>
</originInfo>
<typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
<relatedItem type="host">
<titleInfo>
<title>Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Wanxiang</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Che</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Joyce</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Nabende</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Ekaterina</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Shutova</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Mohammad</namePart>
<namePart type="given">Taher</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Pilehvar</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<publisher>Association for Computational Linguistics</publisher>
<place>
<placeTerm type="text">Vienna, Austria</placeTerm>
</place>
</originInfo>
<genre authority="marcgt">conference publication</genre>
<identifier type="isbn">979-8-89176-251-0</identifier>
</relatedItem>
<abstract>We introduce DavIR, a model-based data selection method for post-training Large Language Models. DavIR generalizes Reducible Holdout Loss to core-set selection problem of causal language modeling, and quantifies the learnability of a given datum with respect to a pre-trained LLM based on relative reduction in loss during fine-tuning, a metric we show to be closely related to the implicit reward model described in Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). We show that 6% of Alpaca dataset selected with DavIR can steer both the LLaMA and Gemma model family to produce superior performance compared to the same models trained on the full 52K dataset. We also show that Alpaca dataset compressed with DavIR can be combined with GSM8K dataset to effectively balance open-domain freeform QA and mathematical reasoning capabilities. Finally, we apply the DavIR objective to DPO and develop a normalized DavIR-DPO objective which improves alignment performance of Zephyr-7B-SFT model by 8% (relative) on AlpacaEval, compared against training on vanilla DPO objective.</abstract>
<identifier type="citekey">zhou-etal-2025-davir</identifier>
<identifier type="doi">10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.452</identifier>
<location>
<url>https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.452/</url>
</location>
<part>
<date>2025-07</date>
<extent unit="page">
<start>9220</start>
<end>9237</end>
</extent>
</part>
</mods>
</modsCollection>
%0 Conference Proceedings
%T DavIR: Data Selection via Implicit Reward for Large Language Models
%A Zhou, Haotian
%A Liu, Tingkai
%A Ma, Qianli
%A Zhang, Yufeng
%A Yuan, Jianbo
%A Liu, Pengfei
%A You, Yang
%A Yang, Hongxia
%Y Che, Wanxiang
%Y Nabende, Joyce
%Y Shutova, Ekaterina
%Y Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher
%S Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
%D 2025
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Vienna, Austria
%@ 979-8-89176-251-0
%F zhou-etal-2025-davir
%X We introduce DavIR, a model-based data selection method for post-training Large Language Models. DavIR generalizes Reducible Holdout Loss to core-set selection problem of causal language modeling, and quantifies the learnability of a given datum with respect to a pre-trained LLM based on relative reduction in loss during fine-tuning, a metric we show to be closely related to the implicit reward model described in Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). We show that 6% of Alpaca dataset selected with DavIR can steer both the LLaMA and Gemma model family to produce superior performance compared to the same models trained on the full 52K dataset. We also show that Alpaca dataset compressed with DavIR can be combined with GSM8K dataset to effectively balance open-domain freeform QA and mathematical reasoning capabilities. Finally, we apply the DavIR objective to DPO and develop a normalized DavIR-DPO objective which improves alignment performance of Zephyr-7B-SFT model by 8% (relative) on AlpacaEval, compared against training on vanilla DPO objective.
%R 10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.452
%U https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.452/
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.452
%P 9220-9237
Markdown (Informal)
[DavIR: Data Selection via Implicit Reward for Large Language Models](https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.452/) (Zhou et al., ACL 2025)
ACL
- Haotian Zhou, Tingkai Liu, Qianli Ma, Yufeng Zhang, Jianbo Yuan, Pengfei Liu, Yang You, and Hongxia Yang. 2025. DavIR: Data Selection via Implicit Reward for Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 9220–9237, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.