The data mixture used in the pre-training of a language model is a cornerstone of its final performance. Static data mixing strategies in Large Language Model (LLM) pre-training are often suboptimal as they fail to adapt to the model’s evolving learning states. Conversely, fully online dynamic updates, while adaptive, incur prohibitive computational costs. To bridge this gap, we propose TiKMiX, an efficient semi-dynamic data mixing framework. Our approach is grounded in a key observation of influence ranking invariance: the relative importance of data domains exhibits strong temporal stability over long training intervals. Leveraging this insight, we propose Group Influence, an efficient approach for quantifying domain impact, and formulate data mixing as a periodic, low-overhead influence maximization problem. Compared with REGMIX, the proposed method reduces computational overhead by 80% and achieves an average performance gain of 2% across nine downstream benchmarks, thereby effectively mitigating data under-digestion.

Recently, instruction-following audio-language models have received broad attention for human-audio interaction. However, the absence of benchmarks capable of evaluating audio-centric interaction capabilities has impeded advancements in this field. Previous models primarily focus on assessing different fundamental tasks, such as automatic speech recognition, and lack an assessment of the open-ended generative capabilities centered around audio. Thus, it is challenging to track the progression in the Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) domain and to provide guidance for future improvement.In this paper, we introduce AIR-Bench (Audio InstRuction Benchmark), the first benchmark designed to evaluate the ability of LALMs to understand various types of audio signals (including human speech, natural sounds, and music), and furthermore, to interact with humans in the textual format. AIR-Bench encompasses two dimensions: foundation and chat benchmarks. The former consists of 19 tasks with approximately 19k single-choice questions, intending to inspect the basic single-task ability of LALMs. The latter one contains 2k instances of open-ended question-and-answer data, directly assessing the comprehension of the model on complex audio and its capacity to follow instructions. Both benchmarks require the model to generate hypotheses directly. We design a unified framework that leverages advanced language models, such as GPT-4, to evaluate the scores of generated hypotheses given the meta-information of the audio. Experimental results demonstrate a high level of consistency between GPT-4-based evaluation and human evaluation. By revealing the limitations of existing LALMs through evaluation results, AIR-Bench can provide insights into the direction of future research. Dataset and evaluation code are available at https://github.com/OFA-Sys/AIR-Bench.