# Batch Loss Score for Dynamic Data Pruning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04681 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04681/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Apr 2026.

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

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO Captions: Data Collection and Evaluation Server](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.00325/) (2015)
- [Vision Mamba: Efficient Visual Representation Learning with Bidirectional State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09417/) (2024)
- [An Empirical Study of Example Forgetting during Deep Neural Network Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05159/) (2018)
- [FlexMatch: Boosting Semi-Supervised Learning with Curriculum Pseudo Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08263/) (2021)
- [Deep Learning on a Data Diet: Finding Important Examples Early in Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07075/) (2021)
- [nocaps: novel object captioning at scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08658/) (2018)
- [Synthetic Data for Text Localisation in Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.06646/) (2016)
- [Selection via Proxy: Efficient Data Selection for Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.11829/) (2019)
- [Not All Samples Are Created Equal: Deep Learning with Importance Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.00942/) (2018)
- [Don't Decay the Learning Rate, Increase the Batch Size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00489/) (2017)
- [Synthetic Data and Artificial Neural Networks for Natural Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2227/) (2014)
- [Read Like Humans: Autonomous, Bidirectional and Iterative Language Modeling for Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06495/) (2021)
- [Dash: Semi-Supervised Learning with Dynamic Thresholding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00650/) (2021)
- [Dataset Pruning: Reducing Training Data by Examining Generalization Influence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09329/) (2022)
- [Online Batch Selection for Faster Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06343/) (2015)
- [USB: A Unified Semi-supervised Learning Benchmark for Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.07204/) (2022)
- [InfoBatch: Lossless Training Speed Up by Unbiased Dynamic Data Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04947/) (2023)
- [Submodular Combinatorial Information Measures with Applications in Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.15412/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Dynamic data pruning accelerates deep learning by selectively omitting less informative samples during training. While per-sample loss is a common importance metric, obtaining it can be challenging or infeasible for complex models or loss functions, often requiring significant implementation effort. This work proposes the Batch Loss Score (BLS), a computationally efficient alternative using an Exponential Moving Average (EMA) of readily available batch losses to assign scores to individual samples. We frame the batch loss, from the perspective of a single sample, as a noisy measurement of its scaled individual loss, with noise originating from stochastic batch composition. It is formally shown that the EMA mechanism functions as a first-order low-pass filter, attenuating high-frequency batch composition noise. This yields a score approximating the smoothed and persistent contribution of the individual sample to the loss, providing a theoretical grounding for BLS as a proxy for sample importance. BLS demonstrates remarkable code integration simplicity (three-line injection) and readily adapts existing per-sample loss-based methods (one-line proxy). Its effectiveness is demonstrated by enhancing two such methods to losslessly prune 20%-50% of samples across textit14 datasets, textit11 tasks and textit18 models, highlighting its utility and broad applicability, especially for complex scenarios where per-sample loss is difficult to access. Code is available at https://github.com/mrazhou/BLS.