Curated LLM: Synergy of LLMs and Data Curation for tabular augmentation in ultra low-data regimes

Machine Learning (ML) in low-data settings remains an underappreciated yet crucial problem. Hence, data augmentation methods to increase the sample size of datasets needed for ML are key to unlocking the transformative potential of ML in data-deprived regions and domains. Unfortunately, the limited training set constrains traditional tabular synthetic data generators in their ability to generate a large and diverse augmented dataset needed for ML tasks. To address this challenge, we introduce CLLM, which leverages the prior knowledge of Large Language Models (LLMs) for data augmentation in the low-data regime. However, not all the data generated by LLMs will improve downstream utility, as for any generative model. Consequently, we introduce a principled curation mechanism, leveraging learning dynamics, coupled with confidence and uncertainty metrics, to obtain a high-quality dataset. Empirically, on multiple real-world datasets, we demonstrate the superior performance of CLLM in the low-data regime compared to conventional generators. Additionally, we provide insights into the LLM generation and curation mechanism, shedding light on the features that enable them to output high-quality augmented datasets.