arXiv Computation and Language

Synthetic Data Characterization via Training Dynamics

The paper investigates how synthetic data generated by large language models (LLMs) can be characterized using sample-level learnability derived from encoder training dynamics. It compares different LLM families and scales across tasks such as single- and multi-label classification, labeling, and tree prediction, and contrasts these synthetic datasets with human-written data. The study also examines the robustness of learned data distributions across encoders and evaluates how data selection strategies based on learnability signals impact the performance of both synthetic and organic data.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 25

Let Training Guide Selection: Online Synthetic Data Filtering via Real-Anchored Utility

The paper introduces FROST, an online framework that filters synthetic training data by estimating its utility through gradient feedback anchored in real data. FROST calibrates batch utility against recent history to decide when to filter, removing 20–30% of synthetic samples while improving performance on image classification and LLM fine-tuning tasks. The method is also applied to a large‑scale industrial ads re‑ranking system, yielding significant gains over an optimized production baseline.

By Yanran Wu, Sana Lakdawala, Renzo Tassara Miller, Chongyang Bai, Sharath Ciddu, Shivendra Pratap Singh, Kungang Li, Sandeep Pandey, Chunwei Liu
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 30

The Advantage of Fine-Grained Training

arXiv:2509. 05130v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In classification problems, models are trained to predict a class label based on the input data features.

By Davide Pirovano, Federico Milanesio, Michele Caselle, Piero Fariselli, Matteo Osella
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 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
arXiv AI
Jun 2

Principled Synthetic Data Enables the First Scaling Laws for LLMs in Recommendation

arXiv:2602. 07298v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) represent a promising frontier for recommender systems, yet their development has been impeded by the absence of predictable scaling laws, which are crucial for guiding research and optimizing resource allocation.

By Benyu Zhang, Qiang Zhang, Jianpeng Cheng, Hong-You Chen, Qifei Wang, Wei Sun, Shen Li, Jia Li, Jiahao Wu, Qunshu Zhang, Neeraj Bhatia, Xiangjun Fan, Hong Yan
arXiv AI
Sep 15

Generalization Can Emerge in Tabular Foundation Models From a Single Table

The paper demonstrates that a tabular foundation model can achieve strong generalization using only a single real table for self‑supervised pre‑training, challenging the belief that large synthetic or real datasets are necessary. By systematically pre‑training and evaluating across diverse benchmarks, the authors show that the number and quality of tasks that can be derived from a dataset are critical for downstream performance. This finding suggests that carefully constructed task sets from limited data can enable effective transfer learning in tabular models.

By Junwei Ma, Nour Shaheen, Alex Labach, Amine Mhedhbi, Frank Hutter, Anthony L. Caterini, Valentin Thomas