arXiv (Cornell University)
Data Mixing Optimization for Supervised Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models
August 2025 • Yuan Li, Zhengzhong Liu, Eric P. Xing
Optimizing data mixtures for supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of large language models (LLMs) is critical for developing general-purpose models, yet this area remains underexplored. In this paper, we frame data mixing as an optimization problem and introduce a novel method designed to minimize validation loss. Our approach parametrizes the loss by modeling effective data transferred and leveraging scaling laws for fine-tuning. By experimenting with various small-scale data mixtures, we fit these parameters and derive …