RAISE: Reinforced Adaptive Instruction Selection For Large Language Models

Qingsong Lv, Yangning Li, Zihua Lan, Zishan Xu, Jiwei Tang, Tingwei Lu, Yinghui Li, Wenhao Jiang, Hong-Gee Kim, Hai-Tao Zheng, Philip S. Yu


Abstract
Instruction tuning of large language models (LLMs) benefits more from a handful of high-quality examples than from hordes of low-quality ones. Existing selection methods typically rely on static, heuristic quality scores and are executed only once before training. Consequently, they neither adapt to the changing state of the model nor target downstream objectives, leaving substantial room for optimization. We propose RAISE (**R**einforced **A**daptive **I**nstruction **SE**lection), a *dynamic*, *task-driven* framework that integrates selection into every training step. At each step, RAISE estimates the expected contribution of each candidate instruction to task performance and admits only the most helpful. By modeling this process as sequential decision making, we optimize the selector with reinforcement learning, yielding an interpretable policy specialized for the target task. Extensive experiments show that RAISE reaches comparable or better results than full-data training while updating only 1% of the steps, demonstrating both high efficacy and significant computational savings.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-emnlp.628
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
11708–11723
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.628/
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Cite (ACL):
Qingsong Lv, Yangning Li, Zihua Lan, Zishan Xu, Jiwei Tang, Tingwei Lu, Yinghui Li, Wenhao Jiang, Hong-Gee Kim, Hai-Tao Zheng, and Philip S. Yu. 2025. RAISE: Reinforced Adaptive Instruction Selection For Large Language Models. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025, pages 11708–11723, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
RAISE: Reinforced Adaptive Instruction Selection For Large Language Models (Lv et al., Findings 2025)
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https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.628.pdf
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