Data Management For Large Language Models: A Survey

Data plays a fundamental role in the training of Large Language Models (LLMs). Effective data management, particularly in the formulation of a well-suited training dataset, holds significance for enhancing model performance and improving training efficiency during pretraining and supervised fine-tuning phases. Despite the considerable importance of data management, the current research community still falls short in providing a systematic analysis of the rationale behind management strategy selection, its consequential effects, methodologies for evaluating curated datasets, and the ongoing pursuit of improved strategies. Consequently, the exploration of data management has attracted more and more attention among the research community. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of current research in data management within both the pretraining and supervised fine-tuning stages of LLMs, covering various noteworthy aspects of data management strategy design: data quantity, data quality, domain/task composition, etc. Looking toward the future, we extrapolate existing challenges and outline promising directions for development in this field. Therefore, this survey serves as a guiding resource for practitioners aspiring to construct powerful LLMs through effective data management practices. The collection of the latest papers is available at https://github.com/ZigeW/data_management_LLM.

SODA: Robust Training of Test-Time Data Adaptors

Adapting models deployed to test distributions can mitigate the performance degradation caused by distribution shifts. However, privacy concerns may render model parameters inaccessible. One promising approach involves utilizing zeroth-order optimization (ZOO) to train a data adaptor to adapt the test data to fit the deployed models. Nevertheless, the data adaptor trained with ZOO typically brings restricted improvements due to the potential corruption of data features caused by the data adaptor. To address this issue, we revisit ZOO in the context of test-time data adaptation. We find that the issue directly stems from the unreliable estimation of the gradients used to optimize the data adaptor, which is inherently due to the unreliable nature of the pseudo-labels assigned to the test data. Based on this observation, we propose pseudo-label-robust data adaptation (SODA) to improve the performance of data adaptation. Specifically, SODA leverages high-confidence predicted labels as reliable labels to optimize the data adaptor with ZOO for label prediction. For data with low-confidence predictions, SODA encourages the adaptor to preserve data information to mitigate data corruption. Empirical results indicate that SODA can significantly enhance the performance of deployed models in the presence of distribution shifts without requiring access to model parameters.