Exploring Learning Complexity for Downstream Data Pruning

The over-parameterized pre-trained models pose a great challenge to fine-tuning with limited computation resources. An intuitive solution is to prune the less informative samples from the fine-tuning dataset. A series of training-based scoring functions are proposed to quantify the informativeness of the data subset but the pruning cost becomes non-negligible due to the heavy parameter updating. For efficient pruning, it is viable to adapt the similarity scoring function of geometric-based methods from training-based to training-free. However, we empirically show that such adaption distorts the original pruning and results in inferior performance on the downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose to treat the learning complexity (LC) as the scoring function for classification and regression tasks. Specifically, the learning complexity is defined as the average predicted confidence of subnets with different capacities, which encapsulates data processing within a converged model. Then we preserve the diverse and easy samples for fine-tuning. Extensive experiments with vision datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed scoring function for classification tasks. For the instruction fine-tuning of large language models, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance with stable convergence, outperforming the full training with only 10% of the instruction dataset.