# Support or Magnitude? Characterizing Neuron Relevance for Instruction Data Selection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16531 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.16531/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [Think you have Solved Question Answering? Try ARC, the AI2 Reasoning Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05457/) (2018)
- [Qwen2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10671/) (2024)
- [CommonsenseQA: A Question Answering Challenge Targeting Commonsense Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00937/) (2018)
- [LIMA: Less Is More for Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11206/) (2023)
- [Tulu 3: Pushing Frontiers in Open Language Model Post-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15124/) (2024)
- [Cross-Task Generalization via Natural Language Crowdsourcing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08773/) (2021)
- [LESS: Selecting Influential Data for Targeted Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04333/) (2024)
- [Beyond neural scaling laws: beating power law scaling via data pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.14486/) (2022)
- [LIMO: Less is More for Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.03387/) (2025)
- [How Far Can Camels Go? Exploring the State of Instruction Tuning on Open Resources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04751/) (2023)
- [What Makes Good Data for Alignment? A Comprehensive Study of Automatic Data Selection in Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15685/) (2023)
- [From Quantity to Quality: Boosting LLM Performance with Self-Guided Data Selection for Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12032/) (2023)
- [Superfiltering: Weak-to-Strong Data Filtering for Fast Instruction-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00530/) (2024)
- [AttnLRP: Attention-Aware Layer-Wise Relevance Propagation for Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05602/) (2024)
- [#InsTag: Instruction Tagging for Analyzing Supervised Fine-tuning of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07074/) (2023)
- [What is Your Data Worth to GPT? LLM-Scale Data Valuation with Influence Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13954/) (2024)
- [D2 Pruning: Message Passing for Balancing Diversity and Difficulty in Data Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07931/) (2023)
- [Active Instruction Tuning: Improving Cross-Task Generalization by Training on Prompt Sensitive Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00288/) (2023)
- [ScaleBiO: Scalable Bilevel Optimization for LLM Data Reweighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19976/) (2024)
- [Towards Understanding Multi-Task Learning (Generalization) of LLMs via Detecting and Exploring Task-Specific Neurons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06488/) (2024)
- [Improving Influence-based Instruction Tuning Data Selection for Balanced Learning of Diverse Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12147/) (2025)
- [Make Every Example Count: On the Stability and Utility of Self-Influence for Learning from Noisy NLP Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13959/) (2023)
- [Quality-Weighted Vendi Scores And Their Application To Diverse Experimental Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02449/) (2024)
- [Diversity-driven Data Selection for Language Model Tuning through Sparse Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14050/) (2025)
- [Task-Specific Data Selection for Instruction Tuning via Monosemantic Neuronal Activations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15573/) (2025)
- [RICo: Refined In-Context Contribution for Automatic Instruction-Tuning Data Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05327/) (2025)
- [Target-Oriented Pretraining Data Selection via Neuron-Activated Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15706/) (2026)
- [YFPO: Yoked Feature Preference Optimization with Neuron-Guided Rewards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.11906/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Model-internal signals, such as neuron activations and gradients, have been used for instruction data selection, yet how neuron relevance should be characterized remains underexplored. In particular, should selection prioritize the magnitude of relevance or how broadly it is distributed across neurons? To investigate this question, we construct sample-level relevance profiles using AttnLRP-guided attribution and introduce two complementary criteria: Effective Relevance Support (ERS), which measures the effective support of positive relevance, and Positive Relevance Magnitude (PRM), which captures its average strength. Our analyses reveal that these characterizations produce distinct sample rankings and selection preferences despite sharing the same underlying relevance profiles. On Qwen2 models, PRM exhibits stronger associations with activation-based selection, whereas ERS produces substantially different rankings. These differences extend to task composition, within-task sample preferences, and semantic selection patterns, with varying degrees of agreement across backbones. Experiments across three language models and five downstream benchmarks demonstrate the practical value of relevance-guided selection, with ERS achieving the best overall average performance rank among the evaluated methods. Our findings highlight that how neuron relevance is distributed and characterized, rather than its magnitude alone, matters for instruction data selection.