OptiSelect: How does the Optimizer Shape Data Curriculum?

Abstract

Online data selection has demonstrated substantial efficiency gains for LLM pretraining by training on the most valuable candidates within each batch. Since a candidate's value is realized through its effective model update, principled selection should account for the optimizer step, which reshapes the raw gradient before it updates model parameters. We formalize this optimizer-aware selection paradigm as OptiSelect and present the first systematic study of how the optimizer shapes data selection. Our theory establishes a selection gain principle in which the advantage of online selection is governed by the discriminability of the optimizer-induced utility scores. We prove that sign-based and polar-tangential preconditioners of Lion and Muon would suffer from a discriminability collapse which caps attainable gains from OptiSelect, whereas diagonal-adaptive optimizers such as AdamW and Sophia admit strictly better upper bounds. The proposed principle also yields a quantitative derivation of the optimal candidate oversampling ratio. Pretraining experiments on 124M and 720M models are consistent with our theoretical analysis and show that AdamW's diagonal-adaptive scoring geometry remains the strongest scoring geometry even with Muon as optimizer. We further demonstrate that OptiSelect retains its benefits under data rephrasing, a technique used in modern data processing pipelines. Our findings provide theoretical foundations and practical guidance for co-designing optimizers and data selection in LLM pretraining.

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