Greedy Information Projection for LLM Data Selection

We present emph{Greedy Information Projection} (textsc{GIP}), a principled framework for choosing training examples for large language model fine-tuning. textsc{GIP} casts selection as maximizing mutual information between a subset of examples and task-specific query signals, which may originate from LLM quality judgments, metadata, or other sources. The framework involves optimizing a closed-form mutual information objective defined using both data and query embeddings, naturally balancing {it quality} and {it diversity}. Optimizing this score is equivalent to maximizing the projection of the query embedding matrix onto the span of the selected data, which provides a geometric explanation for the co-emergence of quality and diversity. Building on this view, we employ a fast greedy matching-pursuit procedure with efficient projection-based updates. On instruction-following and mathematical reasoning datasets, textsc{GIP} selects small subsets that match full-data fine-tuning while using only a fraction of examples and compute, unifying quality-aware and diversity-aware selection for efficient fine-tuning.