Epiplexity Guided Data Selection and Generation for Out-of-Distribution Generalization
Ellen Su, Andres Potapczynski, Shikai Qiu, Edward Hughes, Andrew Gordon Wilson
Modern systems are increasingly expected to transfer across tasks not specified during training. What data facilitates generalization to unanticipated settings? One hypothesis is that data with more structural information could contain shared circuits and subprograms that may be recycled in a wider array of downstream settings. Epiplexity, a recently proposed measure of the structural information a compute-bounded learner can extract from data, offers a mechanism to reason about this relationship. As existing estimators for epiplexity only operate on data already seen during training, we show how to operationalize epiplexity as an online training signal by greedily maximizing its stepwise gain in two settings. For data selection, we fit scaling laws to the training loss curves of natural data domains to predict the expected epiplexity gain as a function of training tokens, and use this signal to adaptively determine the sampling weights over domains during training. For synthetic data generation, where no domain structure exists, we reward a generator with the change in epiplexity of a learner's synthetic training data and use REINFORCE policy gradients to guide the generator toward an epiplexity-maximizing distribution. In both cases, we find higher epiplexity predicts improved downstream performance on zero-shot and fine-tuning tasks, supporting the hypothesis that data rich in structural information yield representations that better transfer across domains.
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