Abstract:Dynamic Data selection aims to accelerate training by prioritizing informative samples during online training. However, existing methods typically rely on task-specific handcrafted metrics or static/snapshot-based criteria to estimate sample importance, limiting scalability across learning paradigms and making it difficult to capture the evolving utility of data throughout training. To address this challenge, we propose Data Agent, an end-to-end dynamic data selection framework that formulates data selection as a training-aware sequential decision-making problem. The agent learns a sample-wise selection policy that co-evolves with model optimization, guided by a composite reward that integrates loss-based difficulty and confidence-based uncertainty signals. The reward signals capture complementary objectives of optimization impact and information gain, together with a tuning-free adaptive weighting mechanism that balances these signals over training. Extensive experiments across a wide range of datasets and architectures demonstrate that Data Agent consistently accelerates training while preserving or improving performance, e.g., reducing costs by over 50\% on ImageNet-1k and MMLU with lossless performance. Moreover, its dataset-agnostic formulation and modular reward make it plug-and-play across tasks and scenarios, e.g., robustness to noisy datasets, highlighting its potential in real-world scenarios. Code is available at this https URL.
| Subjects: | Machine Learning (cs.LG); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2603.07433 [cs.LG] |
| (or arXiv:2603.07433v2 [cs.LG] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.07433 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite |
Submission history
From: Suorong Yang [view email]
[v1]
Sun, 8 Mar 2026 03:10:39 UTC (3,817 KB)
[v2]
Wed, 13 May 2026 01:27:10 UTC (3,818 KB)