FIRE: Flexible Integration of Data Quality Ratings for Effective Pre-Training

Selecting high-quality data can significantly improve the pretraining efficiency of large language models (LLMs). Existing methods generally rely on heuristic techniques and single-quality signals, limiting their ability to evaluate data quality comprehensively. In this work, we propose FIRE, a flexible and scalable framework for integrating multiple data quality raters, which allows for a comprehensive assessment of data quality across various dimensions. FIRE aligns multiple quality signals into a unified space, and integrates diverse data quality raters to provide a comprehensive quality signal for each data point. Further, we introduce a progressive data selection scheme based on FIRE that iteratively refines the selection of high-quality data points. Experiments on the SlimPajama dataset reveal that FIRE outperforms other data selection methods and significantly enhances the pretrained model across a wide range of downstream tasks, with a 2.9% average performance improvement over Random and reducing the FLOPs necessary to achieve a certain performance level by more than half.