RAISE: Reinforced Adaptive Instruction Selection For Large Language Models

ACL ARR 2025 May Submission5865 Authors

Abstract: In the instruction fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs), it is widely recognized that a few high-quality instructions are superior to a large number of low-quality instructions. At present, many instruction selection methods have been proposed, but most of these methods select instruction based on heuristic quality metrics, and only consider data selection before training. These designs lead to insufficient optimization of instruction fine-tuning, and fixed heuristic indicators are often difficult to optimize for specific tasks. Therefore, we design a dynamic, task-objective-driven instruction selection framework **RAISE**(**R**einforced **A**daptive **I**nstruction **SE**lection), which incorporates the entire instruction fine-tuning process into optimization, selecting instructions at each step based on the expected impact of each instruction on model performance improvement. Our approach is well interpretable and has strong task-specific optimization capabilities. By modeling dynamic instruction selection as a sequential decision-making process, we use RL to train our selection strategy. Extensive experiments and result analysis prove the superiority of our method compared with other instruction selection methods. Notably, RAISE achieves superior performance by updating only **1%** of the training steps compared to full-data training, demonstrating its efficiency and effectiveness.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Language Modeling

Research Area Keywords: text-to-text generation

Contribution Types: Publicly available software and/or pre-trained models, Data analysis

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 5865