Swift Cross-Dataset Pruning: Enhancing Fine-Tuning Efficiency in Natural Language Understanding

Nguyen Binh Nguyen, Yang He


Abstract
Dataset pruning aims to select a subset of a dataset for efficient model training. While data efficiency in natural language processing has primarily focused on cross-corpus scenarios during model pre-training, efficient dataset pruning for task-specific fine-tuning across diverse datasets remains challenging due to variability in dataset sizes, data distributions, class imbalance and label spaces. Current cross-dataset pruning techniques for fine-tuning often rely on computationally expensive sample ranking processes, typically requiring full dataset training or reference models. We address this gap by proposing Swift Cross-Dataset Pruning (SCDP). Specifically, our approach uses TF-IDF embeddings with geometric median to rapidly evaluate sample importance. We then apply dataset size-adaptive pruning to ensure diversity: for smaller datasets, we retain examples far from the geometric median, while for larger ones, we employ distance-based stratified pruning. Experimental results on six diverse datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, spanning various tasks and scales while significantly reducing computational resources.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.49
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
726–739
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.49/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nguyen Binh Nguyen and Yang He. 2025. Swift Cross-Dataset Pruning: Enhancing Fine-Tuning Efficiency in Natural Language Understanding. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 726–739, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Swift Cross-Dataset Pruning: Enhancing Fine-Tuning Efficiency in Natural Language Understanding (Nguyen & He, COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.49.pdf