When Data Is Scarce: Scaling Sparse Language Models with Repeated Training
arXiv:2606. 01155v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scaling laws for dense LLMs under infinite data are well explored, but how sparsity interacts with limited data is not.
arXiv:2608. 14071v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As large language models scale, their training-token budgets must also increase to maintain an appropriate tokens-per-parameter ratio (\(\mathrm{TPP}\)).
arXiv:2606. 01155v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scaling laws for dense LLMs under infinite data are well explored, but how sparsity interacts with limited data is not.
The paper investigates how data repetition affects Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models compared to dense Transformers. Across models from 80 M to 1 B active parameters, MoEs degrade more quickly as data is repeated, with performance dropping significantly beyond 4× repetition and overtaking dense models only when strong regularization is applied. The study also identifies routing stabilization and expert specialization as key factors in MoE overfitting, and explores regularization techniques that can partially mitigate this issue.
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.
arXiv:2607. 11052v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine learning progress is often attributed to scaling model size and dataset volume, yet the composition of data can be just as consequential.
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.
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:2606. 24998v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language models are running out of high-quality training data, and even aggressively deduplicated corpora retain some amount of repetition.
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: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...
The paper demonstrates that layer dropout, also known as stochastic depth, can be effectively used in state‑of‑the‑art large language model (LLM) training. By optimizing the layer distribution, schedule, and optimizer settings, the authors show that layer dropout can reduce training loss while saving up to 25 % of training FLOPs. Additionally, layer dropout enables post‑training optimizations such as early exit and self‑speculative decoding, achieving up to 1.5× inference speedup with negligible accuracy loss across models ranging from 271 M to 8.2 B parameters and datasets up to 160 B tokens.
arXiv:2607. 04969v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The training paradigm of large language models has shifted from traditional one-pass training to multi-epoch training, as reasonable reuse of limited high-quality data can improve both model performance and sample efficiency.
The paper investigates how learning rate and batch size scale when pretraining dense large language models on English‑prevalent corpora, examining both jointly optimal and marginal evolutions across model capacity and data size. It explores the benefits of a Warmup‑Stable‑Decay learning‑rate schedule, assessing whether optimal hyperparameters transfer between stable and decay phases, and evaluates loss scaling forms that capture interactions between model capacity and dataset size. The study provides a baseline scaling procedure and releases the full set of pretraining runs for future OpenEuroLLM development.