From Insight to Action: A Novel Framework for Interpretability-Guided Data Selection in Large Language Models

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2604.25167v1
• Date: Tue, 28 Apr 2026 03:16:24 GMT
• Title: From Insight to Action: A Novel Framework for Interpretability-Guided Data Selection in Large Language Models
• Abstract summary: Interpretability-Guided Data Selection (IGDS) is a framework that first identifies causal task features through frequency recall and interventional filtering.<n>We validate IGDS on mathematical reasoning, summarization, and translation tasks within Gemma-2, LLaMA-3.1, and Qwen3 models.
• Score: 73.72877445629383
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: While mechanistic interpretability tools like Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) can uncover meaningful features within Large Language Models (LLMs), a critical gap remains in transforming these insights into practical actions for model optimization. We bridge this gap with the hypothesis that data selection guided by a model's internal task features is a effective training strategy. Inspired by this, we propose Interpretability-Guided Data Selection (IGDS), a framework that first identifies these causal task features through frequency recall and interventional filtering, then selects ``Feature-Resonant Data'' that maximally activates task features for fine-tuning. We validate IGDS on mathematical reasoning, summarization, and translation tasks within Gemma-2, LLaMA-3.1, and Qwen3 models. Our experiments demonstrate exceptional data efficiency: on the Math task, IGDS surpasses full-dataset fine-tuning by a remarkable 17.4% on Gemma-2-2B while using only 50% of the data, and outperforms established baselines focused on data quality and diversity. Analysis confirms a strong positive correlation between feature amplification and task performance improvement. IGDS thus provides a direct and effective framework to enhance LLMs by leveraging their internal mechanisms, validating our core hypothesis.

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