RePro is a web‑recycling technique that trains a small language model (as little as 1 B parameters) with reinforcement learning to produce high‑quality, faithful rephrasings of pretraining data. The method uses one quality reward and three faithfulness rewards to preserve core semantics and structure while converting organic data into better training examples. Experiments show that RePro boosts downstream accuracy by 3.7–14.5 % over organic‑only baselines and improves data efficiency 2–3×, outperforming prior prompting‑based recycling approaches.
By Zichun Yu, Chenyan Xiong
Classical compute-optimal scaling laws assume an unbounded supply of fresh pretraining data, yet pretraining is increasingly entering a regime in which compute grows faster than the availability of high-quality data. We propose Compute-Data (CD) scaling laws, a unified framework that bridges compute-optimal scaling, where data scales freely with compute, and data-optimal scaling, where the corpus is fixed while compute can grow without bound.
arXiv:2607. 25271v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Classical compute-optimal scaling laws assume an unbounded supply of fresh pretraining data, yet pretraining is increasingly entering a regime in which compute grows faster than the availability of high-quality data.
By Tian Qin, Kimia Hamidieh, David Alvarez-Melis
The study evaluates synthetic pre‑pretraining (PPT) across four curricula and three training regimes, finding that allocating compute to PPT never outperforms pure natural‑language training in compute‑matched experiments. Even when natural language data are scarce, repeated epochs over a small natural‑language corpus beat all synthetic curricula on validation loss, and no consistent downstream accuracy advantage is observed. The authors note that PPT gains are sensitive to weight initialization and that models tend to forget PPT knowledge during subsequent natural‑language training, suggesting limited benefits for PPT as a distinct training stage.
By Alexander Stern, Tim Rockt\"aschel, Acyr Locatelli, Laura Ruis
arXiv:2608. 11746v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern systems are increasingly expected to transfer across tasks not specified during training.
By Ellen Su, Andres Potapczynski, Shikai Qiu, Edward Hughes, Andrew Gordon Wilson
arXiv:2609.37891v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Current pre-training datasets are derived from web crawls, with all their issues, and were not designed to support mid- and post-training pipelines--...
By Pierre-Carl Langlais, Pieter Delobelle, Yannick Detrois, Pavel Chizhov, Carlos Rosas-Hinostroza, Neil Si Smail, Benjamin Burtin, Hanna Shcharbakova, Ivan Yamshchikov, Anastasia Stasenko
arXiv:2609.37076v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models trained on vast corpora inherently risk memorizing harmful content that may later re-emerge in their outputs. To mitigate this is...
By Puning Yang, Qizhou Wang, Junchi Yu, Bo Han, Xiuying Chen
arXiv:2606. 06888v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Classical scaling laws for language model pretraining balance model size against training dataset size under a fixed compute budget, assuming abundant data and a single pass over the corpus.
By Zhiwei Xu, Shihao Wu, Hanseul Cho, Wei Hu, Yixin Wang
arXiv:2610.00767v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Pre-training interventions are critical to alignment research, since beliefs formed during pre-training shape how a model generalizes from later trai...
By Peter Nutter, Dani Roytburg, Cl\'ement Dumas, Jinghua Ou, Shi Feng
Pre-training interventions are critical to alignment research, since beliefs formed during pre-training shape how a model generalizes from later training. One recently popular technique for such inter...
Osprey is a target‑agnostic pre‑training method that bootstraps draft models for speculative decoding from existing small language models. By pruning to a shallow backbone, restoring language‑modeling capability with next‑token pretraining, and adapting via vocabulary alignment and distillation, Osprey reduces per‑target work to a lightweight adaptation step. Experiments show that a single Osprey backbone improves mean acceptance length by up to 22.7% and increases tokens per second by 17.5% across several large target models, especially on out‑of‑domain and multilingual data.
By Fengxiang Bie, Yuqing Jian, Yifan Yu, Zhongzhu Zhou, Zelei Shao, Ben Athiwaratkun, Shuaiwen Leon Song, Chenfeng Xu, Xiaoxia Wu, Tianyi Zhang
The paper introduces LARE, a method that adjusts domain weights during large language model pretraining by reweighting losses based on running loss statistics, rather than altering data exposure. Experiments on a 1.5B model trained with 240B tokens show that LARE improves performance across five benchmarks, achieving significant gains on GSM8K (+17.06 pp) and MATH (+9.00 pp). The approach demonstrates that balancing loss scales can enhance joint capabilities without increasing domain exposure.
By Jiazheng Li, Huaqing Zhang, Jing Xu, Tianle Cai, Jingzhao Zhang