An Embarrassingly Simple Data Selection Strategy for Million-Scale Multi-Modal Instruction-Tuning
Mengyao Lyu, Yan Li, Huasong Zhong, Hui Chen, Jungong Han, Guiguang Ding, Zhenheng Yang
Recent research demonstrates that pretrained large language models (LLMs) require minimal but carefully curated data for instruction-tuning. Building on LLMs, multi-modal models further contend with far larger data volumes, heterogeneous sources, and cross-modal alignment, amplifying both the necessity and the complexity of data selection. However, existing methods rely on deeply extracted embeddings, gradients or narrow quality scores that are time-consuming to compute and limited in expressiveness, frequently failing to surpass a simple random-sampling baseline. To overcome these limitations, we step back from complex embedding spaces and target the fundamental objective of instruction tuning: how and what knowledge should be elicited from the pretrained model and exposed to users. We leverage interaction \underline{S}tyles as a proxy for structural diversity, and decompose data quality into capability-specific \underline{S}cores, yielding an explicit yet \underline{R}ich (SSR) profile for each sample. We further cast the selection as submodular coverage maximization over the capability--style grid, providing an approximation guarantee. SSR consistently delivers superior performance across two distinct architecture stacks, LLaVA-1.5 (Vicuna + CLIP) and LLaVA-OneVision (Qwen2 + SigLIP), two large-scale data pools, six data budget settings, and 14 multi-modal benchmarks. To our knowledge, SSR is the first data selection method validated at million-scale, achieving 99.1% of full-data performance using only 30% of a 2.6M pool. Furthermore, the SSR profile models and selected subsets transfer training-free across data pools and model architectures with capability extensibility.
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