Matched Data, Better Models: Target Aligned Data Filtering with Sparse Autoencoders

Data filtering plays a central role in improving model performance, particularly for vision language models that are pretrained on large, noisy, and redundant image-caption datasets. Existing filtering techniques assess every sample individually and retain those that exceed a certain quality threshold, but such strategies fail to capture higher-order interactions. In this work, we propose a novel submodular framework for data selection that addresses this limitation. Our method, Submodular Distribution Matching (SDM), selects a subset by: (1) training a type of sparse autoencoder to learn disentangled and monotone features; (2) estimating a target feature distribution from a target dataset; and (3) selecting a subset of samples whose feature distribution closely matches the target via submodular maximization. Given the DataComp-medium training set and no external models, SDM achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on both ImageNet-1K and average performance across 38 downstream tasks. On the full DataComp-medium benchmark, SDM delivers performance within 1% of the state-of-the-art results while using over 5× fewer GPU hours than the leading approach.