NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper
What is Your Data Worth to GPT? LLM-Scale Data Valuation with Influence Functions
- Sang Choe
- Hwijeen Ahn
- Juhan Bae
- Kewen Zhao
- Youngseog Chung
- Adithya Pratapa
- Willie Neiswanger
- Emma Strubell
Large language models (LLMs) are trained on a vast amount of human-written data, but data providers often remain uncredited. In response to this issue, data valuation (or data attribution), which quantifies the contribution or value of each data to the model output, has been discussed as a potential solution. Nevertheless, applying existing data valuation methods to recent LLMs and their vast training datasets has been largely limited by prohibitive compute and memory costs. In this work, we focus on influence functions, a popular gradient-based data valuation method, and significantly improve its scalability with an efficient gradient projection strategy called LoGra that leverages the gradient structure in backpropagation. We then provide a theoretical motivation of gradient projection approaches to influence functions to promote trust in the data valuation process. Lastly, we lower the barrier to implementing data valuation systems by introducing LogIX, a software package that can transform existing training code into data valuation code with minimal effort. In our data valuation experiments, LoGra achieves competitive accuracy against more expensive baselines while showing up to 6, 500x improvement in throughput and 5x reduction in GPU memory usage when applied to Llama3-8B-Instruct and the 1B-token dataset.