Dimitri Kachler
Author directory2026
Influcoder: Distilling Decoders’ Gradient Influence Rankings into an Encoder for Data Attribution
Dimitri Kachler | Damien Sileo | Pascal Denis
Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 5th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Dimitri Kachler | Damien Sileo | Pascal Denis
Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 5th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Data attribution traces model behavior back to individual training examples, with applications such as identifying training data that induces toxic responses or tracing a model’s factual claims back to the examples that support them. Gradient-based influence methods provide reliable attribution performance, yet are impractical at the scale of LLM training datasets due to their high computational costs. We introduce Influcoder, which distills the LoRA-gradient cosine influence rankings of a target decoder into a compact encoder, reducing attribution at inference time to an embedding cosine similarity. It scores training examples 35x faster than gradient-based influence computed on the target model and 18x faster than influence computed on the smallest comparable proxy model. Our method remains competitive with gradient-based methods even when considering the setup cost, as evaluated on two downstream tasks of toxicity filtering and factual attribution.