The paper investigates why large neural networks outperform smaller ones, focusing on a phenomenon called primacy bias—where early data distributions hinder learning of later ones. It shows that overparameterized models are more robust to this bias, especially during sequential pretraining on heterogeneous data. The authors propose Exposure Therapy, a regularization technique that improves small models’ performance on late data and overall capabilities up to the billion‑parameter scale.
Large neural networks often acquire capabilities that small models fail to learn. Does this stem from large models learning more representative features, or from being more robust to unaccounted-for a...
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.
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.
arXiv:2410.21582v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large-scale pretrained models are widely leveraged as foundations for learning new specialized tasks via fine-tuning, with the goal of mainta...
arXiv:2606. 07527v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The prevailing paradigm for training LLMs has evolved to rely on a massive post-training phase consisting of SFT and RL.
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.
The paper titled "Less Data, Faster Training: repeating smaller datasets speeds up learning via sampling biases" examines how training on a smaller dataset with repeated samples can reduce computational cost compared to using a larger dataset. Across various tasks, architectures, and optimizers, this phenomenon cannot be explained by existing theory. The authors attribute the speedup to layer‑wise growth driven by sampling biases, which is more pronounced with smaller datasets, and provide both theoretical analysis and empirical evidence to support this claim.
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.
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.
arXiv:2605. 29548v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Larger models learn tasks smaller models do not.
arXiv:2510. 01163v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The factors driving the performance of in-context learning (ICL) in large language models (LLMs) remain poorly understood despite ICL's surprising effectiveness, enabling models to adapt to new tasks from only a handful of examples.
arXiv:2506. 14126v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern deep learning is increasingly characterized by the use of open-weight foundation models that can be fine-tuned on specialized datasets.