arXiv Machine Learning

Removing Noise, not Finding Gold: Quality Filtering for Large-Scale Pretraining

arXiv:2510. 00866v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large-scale models are pretrained on massive web-crawled datasets containing documents of mixed quality, making data filtering essential.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 31

How Can We Synthesize High-Quality Pretraining Data? A Systematic Study of Prompt Design, Generator Model, and Source Data

arXiv:2604. 13977v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Synthetic data is a standard component in training large language models, yet systematic comparisons across design dimensions, including rephrasing strategy, generator model, and source data, remain absent.

By Joel Niklaus, Atsuki Yamaguchi, Michal \v{S}tef\'anik, Guilherme Penedo, Hynek Kydl\'i\v{c}ek, Elie Bakouch, Lewis Tunstall, Edward Emanuel Beeching, Thibaud Frere, Colin Raffel, Leandro von Werra, Thomas Wolf
arXiv AI
Jul 28

CuraWeb: Joint Optimization of Quality, Redundancy, and Diversity for Web-Scale Pretraining Data

arXiv:2607. 22662v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open-web corpora curated via highly selective filters, such as FineWeb-Edu and DCLM, constitute the core of LLM pretraining data and have significantly advanced LLM performance.

By Peiguang Li, Yongwei Zhou, Juncheng Diao, Yuchun Fan, Jian Yang, Jianxiao Yang, Zhongda Su, Shuguang Jiao, Xiao Wei, Zhiye Zou, Gan Dong, Zhizhao Zeng, Rongxiang Weng, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 30

DataComp-VLM: Improved Open Datasets for Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2606. 28551v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Building performant Vision-Language Models (VLMs) requires carefully curating large-scale training datasets, yet the community lacks systematic benchmarks for evaluating such curation strategies.

By Matteo Farina, Vishaal Udandarao, Thao Nguyen, Selim Kuzucu, Maximilian B\"other, Andreas Hochlehnert, Adhiraj Ghosh, Marianna Nezhurina, Karsten Roth, Joschka Struber, Yuhui Zhang, Sebastian Dziadzio, Elaine Sui, Soumya Jahagirdar, Dhruba Ghosh, Hasan Hammoud, Thomas De Min, Simone Caldarella, Jehanzeb Mirza, Sedrick Keh, Mehdi Cherti, Hilde Kuehne, Bernt Schiele, Serena Yeung-Levy, Muhammad Ferjad Naeem, Federico Tombari, Ana Klimovic, Elisa Ricci, Matthias Bethge, Sewoong Oh, Ameya Prabhu, Alessio Tonioni, Jenia Jitsev, Massimiliano Mancini, Ludwig Schmidt, Nikhil Parthasarathy
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 24

DataPrep-Bench: Benchmarking LLMs as Training Data Preparators

arXiv:2607. 20465v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The quality of training data fundamentally determines the capabilities of large language models (LLMs), yet no unified benchmark exists to measure how well LLMs, agents, and data-centric workflows actually prepare training data end to end.

By Hao Liang, Qifeng Cai, Yibo Lin, Jianzhuo Du, Qifeng Xia, Sizhe Qiu, Linzhuang Sun, Meiyi Qiang, Zhaoyang Han, Xiaochen Ma, Bohan Zeng, Ruichuan An, Conghui He, Wentao Zhang
arXiv AI
Jun 16

CHILLGuard: Towards Fine-Grained Chinese LLM Safety Guardrail with Scalable Data Construction and Model-aware Preference Alignment

arXiv:2606. 15396v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Malicious content generated from large language models (LLMs) could pose severe safety risks and ethical concerns.

By Wenbo Yu, Bohua Wang, Hao Fang, Kuofeng Gao, Jingru Zeng, Xiaochen Yang, Tianyi Zhang, Xiaoxiao Ma, Jiawei Kong, Hao Wu, Bin Chen, Shu-Tao Xia, Min Zhang
arXiv AI
Jul 15

Scaling Point-in-Time Language Models

arXiv:2607. 11889v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models trained on unrestricted internet corpora inevitably embed information from the future, introducing lookahead bias that compromises the validity of backtests and causal inference in finance and the social sciences.

By Bryan Kelly, Semyon Malamud, Johannes Schwab, Teng Andrea Xu