HARP: Efficient Data Selection for Finetuning Large Language Models

Abstract

Finetuning data selection requires balancing two competing goals: selecting examples that improve the downstream objective, and doing so without repeatedly finetuning models. Train-free selectors are scalable but rely on proxies such as embedding similarity or clustering, which may not match the target objective. Train-based selectors better reflect downstream utility through gradient signals, subset evaluation, or Shapley attribution, but require many costly train-evaluate iterations. We propose Hierarchical Active Region Pruning (HARP), an efficient train-based selector that preserves downstream alignment while reducing selection cost. HARP organizes the training pool into a node-leaf hierarchy, evaluates only representative leaves, and infers unmeasured utilities with empirical Bayes posteriors. It then selects data using two complementary envelopes: HARP-C, which conservatively controls redundancy, and HARP-E, which additively rewards complementary regions. We theoretically show that, under local smoothness and bounded estimation error, HARP controls selection error while reducing train-evaluate cost. Across 3 base models, 3 finetuning datasets, and 4 reasoning benchmarks (36 settings), HARP variants achieve the highest accuracy among ranked methods in 23 settings and obtain 36-setting mean accuracies of 64.2 and 63.5, respectively, compared with 59.3 for the strongest baseline, NICE. HARP-C trains on roughly 9x fewer examples than the budgeted baselines and 75x fewer than full finetuning, combining higher mean accuracy with a smaller mean training-set size than every ranked baseline.