Selection of LLM Fine-Tuning Data based on Orthogonal Rules

Abstract

High-quality training data is critical to the performance of large language models (LLMs). Recent work has explored using LLMs to rate and select data based on a small set of human-designed criteria (rules), but these approaches often rely heavily on heuristics, lack principled metrics for rule evaluation, and generalize poorly to new tasks. We propose a novel rule-based data selection framework that introduces a metric based on the orthogonality of rule score vectors to evaluate and select complementary rules. Our automated pipeline first uses LLMs to generate diverse rules covering multiple aspects of data quality, then rates samples according to these rules and applies the determinantal point process (DPP) to select the most independent rules. These rules are then used to score the full dataset, and high-scoring samples are selected for downstream tasks such as LLM fine-tuning. We evaluate our framework in two experiment setups: (1) alignment with ground-truth ratings and (2) performance of LLMs fine-tuned on the selected data. Experiments across IMDB, Medical, Math, and Code domains demonstrate that our DPP-based rule selection consistently improves both rating accuracy and downstream model performance over strong baselines.