Target-Oriented Pretraining Data Selection via Neuron-Activated Graph
Everyday tasks come with a target, and pretraining models around this target is what turns them into experts. In this paper, we study target-oriented language model (LM) pretraining by introducing Neuron-Activated Graph Ranking (NAG-based Ranking), a training-free and interpretable framework for target pretraining data selection. Rather than using black-box representations, our approach directly characterizes each target input by a sparse set of high-impact neurons in any off-the-shelf LLMs. Concretely, we quantify neuron impact and select the most influential neurons across layers into a compact Neuron-Activated Graph (NAG), and rank candidate data by NAG similarity to target examples. W...
| Authors | Zijun Wang, Haoqin Tu, Weidong Zhou et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 17 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 17 April 2026 |
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