Dynamic Data Mixing Maximizes Instruction Tuning for Mixture-of-Experts
Tong Zhu, Daize Dong, Xiaoye Qu, Jiacheng Ruan, Wenliang Chen, Yu Cheng
Abstract
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models have shown remarkable capability in instruction tuning, especially when the number of tasks scales. However, previous methods simply merge all training tasks (e.g. creative writing, coding, and mathematics) and apply fixed sampling weights, without considering the importance of different tasks as the model training state changes. In this way, the most helpful data cannot be effectively distinguished, leading to suboptimal model performance. To reduce the potential redundancies of datasets, we make the first attempt and propose a novel dynamic data mixture for MoE instruction tuning. Specifically, inspired by MoE’s token routing preference, we build dataset-level representations and then capture the subtle differences among datasets. Finally, we propose to dynamically adjust the sampling weight of datasets by their inter-redundancies, thus maximizing global performance under a limited training budget. The experimental results on two MoE models demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on both downstream knowledge & reasoning tasks and open-ended queries.- Anthology ID:
- 2025.naacl-long.80
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- April
- Year:
- 2025
- Address:
- Albuquerque, New Mexico
- Editors:
- Luis Chiruzzo, Alan Ritter, Lu Wang
- Venue:
- NAACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 1663–1677
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.naacl-long.80/
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Tong Zhu, Daize Dong, Xiaoye Qu, Jiacheng Ruan, Wenliang Chen, and Yu Cheng. 2025. Dynamic Data Mixing Maximizes Instruction Tuning for Mixture-of-Experts. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1663–1677, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Dynamic Data Mixing Maximizes Instruction Tuning for Mixture-of-Experts (Zhu et al., NAACL 2025)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.naacl-long.80.pdf