# QuRating: Selecting High-Quality Data for Training Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.09739 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09739/

## Key facts

- Cited by 157 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 92 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Feb 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Think you have Solved Question Answering? Try ARC, the AI2 Reasoning Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05457/) (2018)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [Training a Helpful and Harmless Assistant with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05862/) (2022)
- [Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15556/) (2022)
- [The Pile: An 800GB Dataset of Diverse Text for Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00027/) (2020)
- [BoolQ: Exploring the Surprising Difficulty of Natural Yes/No Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10044/) (2019)
- [GLU Variants Improve Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05202/) (2020)
- [Scaling Language Models: Methods, Analysis & Insights from Training Gopher](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11446/) (2021)
- [PaLM 2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10403/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models are not Fair Evaluators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17926/) (2023)
- [GLaM: Efficient Scaling of Language Models with Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06905/) (2021)
- [AlpacaFarm: A Simulation Framework for Methods that Learn from Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14387/) (2023)
- [Textbooks Are All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11644/) (2023)
- [Carbon Emissions and Large Neural Network Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10350/) (2021)
- [CCNet: Extracting High Quality Monolingual Datasets from Web Crawl Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00359/) (2019)
- [Quantifying the Carbon Emissions of Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09700/) (2019)
- [Sheared LLaMA: Accelerating Language Model Pre-training via Structured Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06694/) (2023)
- [Scaling Data-Constrained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16264/) (2023)
- [DoReMi: Optimizing Data Mixtures Speeds Up Language Model Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10429/) (2023)
- [FastText.zip: Compressing text classification models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03651/) (2016)
- [Data Selection for Language Models via Importance Resampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03169/) (2023)
- [SemDeDup: Data-efficient learning at web-scale through semantic deduplication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09540/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 157)

- [A Survey on Large Language Models for Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00515/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Test-Time Scaling in Large Language Models: What, How, Where, and How Well?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.24235/) (2025)
- [An Introduction to Vision-Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17247/) (2024)
- [RewardBench 2: Advancing Reward Model Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01937/) (2025)
- [How to Train Long-Context Language Models (Effectively)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02660/) (2024)
- [MATES: Model-Aware Data Selection for Efficient Pretraining with Data Influence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06046/) (2024)
- [Organize the Web: Constructing Domains Enhances Pre-Training Data Curation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10341/) (2025)
- [Nemotron-CLIMB: CLustering-based Iterative Data Mixture Bootstrapping for Language Model Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13161/) (2025)
- [Collapse or Thrive? Perils and Promises of Synthetic Data in a Self-Generating World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16713/) (2024)
- [Scaling Laws for Optimal Data Mixtures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09404/) (2025)
- [Entropy Law: The Story Behind Data Compression and LLM Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06645/) (2024)
- [What is the Role of Small Models in the LLM Era: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06857/) (2024)
- [Ultra-FineWeb: Efficient Data Filtering and Verification for High-Quality LLM Training Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05427/) (2025)
- [Programming Every Example: Lifting Pre-training Data Quality Like Experts at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17115/) (2024)
- [Principled Data Selection for Alignment: The Hidden Risks of Difficult Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09650/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Scientific Large Language Models: From Data Foundations to Agent Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.21148/) (2025)
- [Surveying the Effects of Quality, Diversity, and Complexity in Synthetic Data From Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02980/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Multilingual LLM Pretraining with Model-Based Data Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10361/) (2025)
- [Large-Scale Data Selection for Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01807/) (2025)
- [Harnessing Diversity for Important Data Selection in Pretraining Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16986/) (2024)
- [Recycling the Web: A Method to Enhance Pre-training Data Quality and Quantity for Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04689/) (2025)
- [TAGCOS: Task-agnostic Gradient Clustered Coreset Selection for Instruction Tuning Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15235/) (2024)
- [Unleashing the Power of Data Tsunami: A Comprehensive Survey on Data Assessment and Selection for Instruction Tuning of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02085/) (2024)
- [Shifting AI Efficiency From Model-Centric to Data-Centric Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19147/) (2025)
- [ProSec: Fortifying Code LLMs with Proactive Security Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12882/) (2024)
- [DataFlow: An LLM-Driven Framework for Unified Data Preparation and Workflow Automation in the Era of Data-Centric AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16676/) (2025)
- [Metadata Conditioning Accelerates Language Model Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01956/) (2025)
- [Weak-to-Strong Generalization Through the Data-Centric Lens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03881/) (2024)
- [Predictive Data Selection: The Data That Predicts Is the Data That Teaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00808/) (2025)
- [A Survey on LLM Mid-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23081/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Selecting high-quality pre-training data is important for creating capable language models, but existing methods rely on simple heuristics. We introduce QuRating, a method for selecting pre-training data that can capture human intuitions about data quality. In this paper, we investigate four qualities - writing style, required expertise, facts & trivia, and educational value - and find that LLMs are able to discern these qualities, especially when making pairwise judgments of texts. We train a QuRater model to learn scalar ratings from pairwise judgments, and use it to annotate a 260B training corpus with quality ratings for each of the four criteria. In our experiments, we select 30B tokens according to the different quality ratings and train 1.3B-parameter language models on the selected data. We find that it is important to balance quality and diversity. When we sample using quality ratings as logits over documents, our models obtain lower perplexity and stronger in-context learning performance than baselines. Our best model is based on educational value and performs similarly to a model trained with uniform sampling for 50% more steps. Beyond data selection, we use the quality ratings to construct a training curriculum which improves performance without changing the training dataset. We extensively analyze the quality ratings and discuss their characteristics, biases, and wider implications.