How to Train Data-Efficient LLMs

The training of large language models (LLMs) is expensive. In this paper, we study data-efficient approaches for pre-training LLMs, i.e., techniques that aim to optimize the Pareto frontier of model quality and training resource/data consumption. We seek to understand the tradeoffs associated with data selection routines based on (i) expensive-to-compute data-quality estimates, and (ii) maximization of coverage and diversity-based measures in the feature space. Our first technique, Ask-LLM, leverages the zero-shot reasoning capabilities of instruction-tuned LLMs to directly assess the quality of a training example. To target coverage, we propose Density sampling, which models the data distribution to select a diverse sample. In our comparison of 19 samplers, involving hundreds of evaluation tasks and pre-training runs, we find that Ask-LLM and Density are the best methods in their respective categories. Coverage sampling can recover the performance of the full data, while models trained on Ask-LLM data consistently outperform full-data training -- even when we reject 90% of the original dataset, while converging up to 70% faster.

Off-Policy Evaluation for Large Action Spaces via Policy Convolution

Developing accurate off-policy estimators is crucial for both evaluating and optimizing for new policies. The main challenge in off-policy estimation is the distribution shift between the logging policy that generates data and the target policy that we aim to evaluate. Typically, techniques for correcting distribution shift involve some form of importance sampling. This approach results in unbiased value estimation but often comes with the trade-off of high variance, even in the simpler case of one-step contextual bandits. Furthermore, importance sampling relies on the common support assumption, which becomes impractical when the action space is large. To address these challenges, we introduce the Policy Convolution (PC) family of estimators. These methods leverage latent structure within actions -- made available through action embeddings -- to strategically convolve the logging and target policies. This convolution introduces a unique bias-variance trade-off, which can be controlled by adjusting the amount of convolution. Our experiments on synthetic and benchmark datasets demonstrate remarkable mean squared error (MSE) improvements when using PC, especially when either the action space or policy mismatch becomes large, with gains of up to 5 - 6 orders of magnitude over existing estimators.

Farzi Data: Autoregressive Data Distillation

We study data distillation for auto-regressive machine learning tasks, where the input and output have a strict left-to-right causal structure. More specifically, we propose Farzi, which summarizes an event sequence dataset into a small number of synthetic sequences -- Farzi Data -- which are optimized to maintain (if not improve) model performance compared to training on the full dataset. Under the hood, Farzi conducts memory-efficient data distillation by (i) deriving efficient reverse-mode differentiation of the Adam optimizer by leveraging Hessian-Vector Products; and (ii) factorizing the high-dimensional discrete event-space into a latent-space which provably promotes implicit regularization. Empirically, for sequential recommendation and language modeling tasks, we are able to achieve 98-120% of downstream full-data performance when training state-of-the-art models on Farzi Data of size as little as 0.1% of the original dataset. Notably, being able to train better models with significantly less data sheds light on the design of future large auto-regressive models, and opens up new opportunities to further scale up model and data sizes.

Data Distillation: A Survey

The popularity of deep learning has led to the curation of a vast number of massive and multifarious datasets. Despite having close-to-human performance on individual tasks, training parameter-hungry models on large datasets poses multi-faceted problems such as (a) high model-training time; (b) slow research iteration; and (c) poor eco-sustainability. As an alternative, data distillation approaches aim to synthesize terse data summaries, which can serve as effective drop-in replacements of the original dataset for scenarios like model training, inference, architecture search, etc. In this survey, we present a formal framework for data distillation, along with providing a detailed taxonomy of existing approaches. Additionally, we cover data distillation approaches for different data modalities, namely images, graphs, and user-item interactions (recommender systems), while also identifying current challenges and future research directions.

Infinite Recommendation Networks: A Data-Centric Approach

We leverage the Neural Tangent Kernel and its equivalence to training infinitely-wide neural networks to devise $\infty$-AE: an autoencoder with infinitely-wide bottleneck layers. The outcome is a highly expressive yet simplistic recommendation model with a single hyper-parameter and a closed-form solution. Leveraging $\infty$-AE's simplicity, we also develop Distill-CF for synthesizing tiny, high-fidelity data summaries which distill the most important knowledge from the extremely large and sparse user-item interaction matrix for efficient and accurate subsequent data-usage like model training, inference, architecture search, etc. This takes a data-centric approach to recommendation, where we aim to improve the quality of logged user-feedback data for subsequent modeling, independent of the learning algorithm. We particularly utilize the concept of differentiable Gumbel-sampling to handle the inherent data heterogeneity, sparsity, and semi-structuredness, while being scalable to datasets with hundreds of millions of user-item interactions. Both of our proposed approaches significantly outperform their respective state-of-the-art and when used together, we observe 96-105% of $\infty$-AE's performance on the full dataset with as little as 0.1% of the original dataset size, leading us to explore the counter-intuitive question: Is more data what you need for better recommendation?

On Sampling Collaborative Filtering Datasets

We study the practical consequences of dataset sampling strategies on the ranking performance of recommendation algorithms. Recommender systems are generally trained and evaluated on samples of larger datasets. Samples are often taken in a naive or ad-hoc fashion: e.g. by sampling a dataset randomly or by selecting users or items with many interactions. As we demonstrate, commonly-used data sampling schemes can have significant consequences on algorithm performance. Following this observation, this paper makes three main contributions: (1) characterizing the effect of sampling on algorithm performance, in terms of algorithm and dataset characteristics (e.g. sparsity characteristics, sequential dynamics, etc.); (2) designing SVP-CF, which is a data-specific sampling strategy, that aims to preserve the relative performance of models after sampling, and is especially suited to long-tailed interaction data; and (3) developing an oracle, Data-Genie, which can suggest the sampling scheme that is most likely to preserve model performance for a given dataset. The main benefit of Data-Genie is that it will allow recommender system practitioners to quickly prototype and compare various approaches, while remaining confident that algorithm performance will be preserved, once the algorithm is retrained and deployed on the complete data. Detailed experiments show that using Data-Genie, we can discard upto 5x more data than any sampling strategy with the same level of performance.

ECLARE: Extreme Classification with Label Graph Correlations

Deep extreme classification (XC) seeks to train deep architectures that can tag a data point with its most relevant subset of labels from an extremely large label set. The core utility of XC comes from predicting labels that are rarely seen during training. Such rare labels hold the key to personalized recommendations that can delight and surprise a user. However, the large number of rare labels and small amount of training data per rare label offer significant statistical and computational challenges. State-of-the-art deep XC methods attempt to remedy this by incorporating textual descriptions of labels but do not adequately address the problem. This paper presents ECLARE, a scalable deep learning architecture that incorporates not only label text, but also label correlations, to offer accurate real-time predictions within a few milliseconds. Core contributions of ECLARE include a frugal architecture and scalable techniques to train deep models along with label correlation graphs at the scale of millions of labels. In particular, ECLARE offers predictions that are 2 to 14% more accurate on both publicly available benchmark datasets as well as proprietary datasets for a related products recommendation task sourced from the Bing search engine. Code for ECLARE is available at https://github.com/Extreme-classification/ECLARE.

SVP-CF: Selection via Proxy for Collaborative Filtering Data

We study the practical consequences of dataset sampling strategies on the performance of recommendation algorithms. Recommender systems are generally trained and evaluated on samples of larger datasets. Samples are often taken in a naive or ad-hoc fashion: e.g. by sampling a dataset randomly or by selecting users or items with many interactions. As we demonstrate, commonly-used data sampling schemes can have significant consequences on algorithm performance -- masking performance deficiencies in algorithms or altering the relative performance of algorithms, as compared to models trained on the complete dataset. Following this observation, this paper makes the following main contributions: (1) characterizing the effect of sampling on algorithm performance, in terms of algorithm and dataset characteristics (e.g. sparsity characteristics, sequential dynamics, etc.); and (2) designing SVP-CF, which is a data-specific sampling strategy, that aims to preserve the relative performance of models after sampling, and is especially suited to long-tail interaction data. Detailed experiments show that SVP-CF is more accurate than commonly used sampling schemes in retaining the relative ranking of different recommendation algorithms.

Off-policy Bandits with Deficient Support

Learning effective contextual-bandit policies from past actions of a deployed system is highly desirable in many settings (e.g. voice assistants, recommendation, search), since it enables the reuse of large amounts of log data. State-of-the-art methods for such off-policy learning, however, are based on inverse propensity score (IPS) weighting. A key theoretical requirement of IPS weighting is that the policy that logged the data has "full support", which typically translates into requiring non-zero probability for any action in any context. Unfortunately, many real-world systems produce support deficient data, especially when the action space is large, and we show how existing methods can fail catastrophically. To overcome this gap between theory and applications, we identify three approaches that provide various guarantees for IPS-based learning despite the inherent limitations of support-deficient data: restricting the action space, reward extrapolation, and restricting the policy space. We systematically analyze the statistical and computational properties of these three approaches, and we empirically evaluate their effectiveness. In addition to providing the first systematic analysis of support-deficiency in contextual-bandit learning, we conclude with recommendations that provide practical guidance.

How Useful are Reviews for Recommendation? A Critical Review and Potential Improvements

We investigate a growing body of work that seeks to improve recommender systems through the use of review text. Generally, these papers argue that since reviews 'explain' users' opinions, they ought to be useful to infer the underlying dimensions that predict ratings or purchases. Schemes to incorporate reviews range from simple regularizers to neural network approaches. Our initial findings reveal several discrepancies in reported results, partly due to (e.g.) copying results across papers despite changes in experimental settings or data pre-processing. First, we attempt a comprehensive analysis to resolve these ambiguities. Further investigation calls for discussion on a much larger problem about the "importance" of user reviews for recommendation. Through a wide range of experiments, we observe several cases where state-of-the-art methods fail to outperform existing baselines, especially as we deviate from a few narrowly-defined settings where reviews are useful. We conclude by providing hypotheses for our observations, that seek to characterize under what conditions reviews are likely to be helpful. Through this work, we aim to evaluate the direction in which the field is progressing and encourage robust empirical evaluation.