arXiv Machine Learning

Epiplexity Guided Data Selection and Generation for Out-of-Distribution Generalization

arXiv:2608. 11746v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern systems are increasingly expected to transfer across tasks not specified during training.

arXiv AI
Sep 10

Generating Pretraining Tokens from Organic Data for Data-Bound Scaling

The paper introduces SynPro, a synthetic data generation framework that augments limited organic text for large language model pretraining by applying rephrasing and reformatting operations. SynPro’s generators are optimized with reinforcement learning rewards for quality, faithfulness, and data influence, and are updated continuously as training plateaus. Experiments on 400M, 1.1B, and 2B models show that SynPro can unlock 3.4–5.2× the effective tokens of standard repetition, even outperforming a non‑data‑bound oracle at larger scales.

By Zichun Yu, Chenyan Xiong
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 18

Improving Generalization and Robustness in Offline Reinforcement Learning via Boundary-Aware Data Augmentation

The paper introduces BADA, a Boundary-Aware Data Augmentation technique for offline reinforcement learning. By interpolating neighboring states to create synthetic data that respects the original distribution, BADA improves in-distribution generalization and robustness. Experiments on limited offline datasets show that BADA achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse benchmarks.

By Gong Gao, Weidong Zhao, Xianhui Liu
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Procedural Pretraining for Molecular Property Prediction

The paper proposes a three‑stage training pipeline that begins with procedural pretraining on abstract, procedurally generated data, followed by molecular pretraining on SMILES, and finally downstream fine‑tuning for molecular property prediction. Experiments show that procedural pretraining improves downstream performance—e.g., a 4.8% error reduction on Lipophilicity—especially when labeled data are scarce, and that the benefit peaks at an intermediate procedural training budget. Analysis indicates that transferable knowledge resides mainly in attention layers, while feed‑forward layers may over‑specialize.

By Moritz Friedemann, Zachary Shinnick, Philip Torr, Bruno Andreis