Reclaiming Low-Quality Instruction Data with Rule-Guided LLM Reconstruction

arXiv:2510.23160v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Data selection for supervised fine-tuning (SFT) often discards low-scoring instruction examples that may retain useful supervision. We propose a rule-guided LLM reconstruction framework to reclaim this information. The framework identifies low-scoring samples through LLM-based rating and score correction, selects semantically representative sources, and reconstructs instruction-response pairs through strategy-guided generation, criteria-based validation, and failure-guided repair. From 123,786 low-scoring samples, it constructs 54,888 training examples. Across three 7B/8B base LLMs, the reconstructed data achieves higher average downstream performance than the low-scoring source set and all evaluated data-selection baselines. Despite using substantially fewer examples than the full source dataset (approximately 300K), it achieves higher reported average scores than full-data training across all three base models. Stepwise ablations identify rule-guided reconstruction as the largest source of observed improvements over direct fusion, while a manual audit reveals remaining limitations in source integration and answer faithfulness. These findings support reconstruction as a complementary approach to selection-based SFT data curation.