arXiv AI

q0: Primitives for Hyper-Epoch Pretraining

arXiv:2606. 03938v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-epoch training is becoming the standard now that compute is growing faster than the supply of high-quality text.

arXiv AI
Jul 29

Bridging Compute- and Data-Optimal Pretraining

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
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 10

Osprey: Target-agnostic Pre-training Makes Stronger Drafters in Speculative Decoding

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
arXiv AI
Aug 20

Demystifying Training-Time Augmentation for Data-Constrained Language Model Pretraining

The paper investigates training-time data augmentation as a regularizer for autoregressive language model pretraining in data‑constrained, compute‑abundant settings. It introduces three orthogonal augmentation categories—token‑level noise, sequence permutations, and target offset prediction—and shows through systematic ablations that each category delays overfitting and reduces validation loss, with random token replacement performing best individually. Combining augmentation categories further lowers the minimum validation loss, demonstrating that such augmentations mitigate data inefficiency in autoregressive pretraining.

By Michael K. Chen, Xikun Zhang, Fan Bai, Zhengding Hu, Zhen Wang
arXiv AI
Aug 25

How Should LLMs Consume High-Quality Data? Optimal Data Scheduling via Quality-Aware Functional Scaling Laws

The paper proposes a theoretical framework for scheduling high‑quality data in large language model training by extending functional scaling laws to account for time‑varying data quality. It identifies two regimes—noise‑limited and signal‑limited—where high‑quality data should be used differently, and introduces a Drop‑Stable‑Rampup training schedule that adjusts batch size at the quality transition. Experiments on 15B MoE and 600M dense models show significant accuracy gains over conventional decay schedules across multiple benchmarks.

By Zhitao Zhu, Xili Wang, Shizhe Wu, Jiawei Fu, Xiaoqing Liu