arXiv Computation and Language

Rewriting Scaling Laws for Synthetic Data with Compute and Data Constraints

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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 28

Bridging Compute- and Data-Optimal Pretraining

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 Machine Learning
Sep 23

Practical Scaling Laws: Converting Compute into Performance in a Data-Constrained World

The paper introduces a new closed‑form scaling law that extends Chinchilla’s original formula to handle data‑constrained regimes. It decomposes loss into undercapacity, undertraining, and overfitting components, saturating between an irreducible loss and an uninformed baseline. The authors validate the model on diverse architectures and domains, achieving state‑of‑the‑art RMSE across multiple LLM scaling‑law grids and enabling cost‑aware training allocations.

By Christopher M. Bryant, Hao Liu
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 16

Patch where the text is new: a compression view of where byte-level models should spend compute

The paper introduces a novel patching strategy for byte‑level language models, called novelty patching, which starts a new patch when upcoming bytes are unlikely to repeat recent context, inspired by LZ77 compression. Experiments on a 1.9 GB math corpus show that novelty patching improves final‑answer accuracy from 47 % to 72 % at 12 M parameters and raises computed‑result accuracy from 21 % to 57 % at 50 M parameters, while having limited impact on prose and source code. The study also analyzes patch boundary distributions and reports several failed approaches, such as typed uncertainty and context‑aware novelty prediction. whyItMatters":"The findings demonstrate that a simple, data‑driven patching rule can significantly enhance the performance of byte‑level models on tasks involving computed results, offering a practical improvement for large language models that process raw text without explicit labels."

By Nicol\'as Vera Z\'u\~niga
arXiv AI
Oct 7

Toward Alignment Scaling Laws: A Framework and First Preregistered Measurements

The paper proposes a framework for studying how alignment difficulty scales with model size, treating alignment as a family of measurable scaling relations for different risk categories. It introduces operational definitions of burden, distinguishes observed, audited, and true alignment, and proves that the largest exponent among corrected risks determines long‑run behavior. The authors preregistered and applied the protocol to public data, finding scaling exponents for attack success, truthfulness, dispositions, sycophancy, and a backdoor, and released interactive browser games to illustrate the laws.

By Jeremy Canale
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 16

Long-Context Drafting Does Not Require Long-Context Drafters

The paper shows that long‑context drafting can be performed with short‑context drafters that are frozen and run beyond their training length, using two inference‑time mechanisms to keep their cost bounded. By bounding the attention cache and re‑basing rotary position indices, the authors demonstrate that the speedup achieved with a short‑context drafter persists up to two million tokens across multiple target‑drafter pairs and corpora. They prove that when a common index shift leaves the drafter’s computation unchanged, the acceptance gap can be tightly bounded, ensuring consistent performance.

By Aref Jafari, Vansh Bhatia, Matt Qin, Subhajit Dutta Chowdhury, Ben Lee, Vikram Appia, Ali Ghodsi, Mehdi Rezagholizadeh
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Efficiently Estimating Optimal Hyperparameter Scaling Laws through Power-Law Entropy Search

The paper introduces Power‑Law Entropy Search (PLES), a computational‑cost‑aware acquisition function that uses multi‑fidelity Bayesian optimization to efficiently estimate optimal hyperparameter scaling laws for large language model training. PLES focuses on reducing the overall uncertainty of scaling law estimates rather than optimizing a single objective, selecting configurations that maximize uncertainty reduction per unit computational cost. Experiments on synthetic benchmarks, surrogate models, and real LLM pre‑training runs show that PLES converges to accurate scaling laws using less than one‑tenth of the computational budget required by conventional grid search and other baselines.

By Zhiliang Chen, Sebastian Ament, David Eriksson, Maximilian Balandat, Eytan Bakshy, Jihao Andreas Lin