arXiv Machine Learning

Internal Data Repetition Destroys Language Models

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 Machine Learning
Sep 11

Data Scarcity and Model Sparsity: Mixtures-of-Experts Overfit More to Repeated Data

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.

By Atindra Jha, Margaret Li, Jure Leskovec, Percy Liang, Luke Zettlemoyer
arXiv AI
Aug 17

Scaling Domain Data Repetition in LLM Pretraining

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 (\(\mathrm{TPP}\)).

By Jingwei Li, Xinran Gu, Rui Dai, Xintong Hao, Chengyin Xu, Yan Wu, Shuran Zheng, Jingzhao Zhang
arXiv AI
Jun 24

Can Scale Save Us From Plasticity Loss in Large Language Models?

arXiv:2606. 24752v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The loss of plasticity - the ability of a network to learn new information after having already learned older information - is a fundamental challenge in creating artificial neural networks capable of continual learning.

By J. Fernando Hernandez-Garcia, Tom\'as Figliolia, Beren Millidge
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 23

Can Scale Save Us From Plasticity Loss in Large Language Models?

The loss of plasticity - the ability of a network to learn new information after having already learned older information - is a fundamental challenge in creating artificial neural networks capable of continual learning. Although this phenomenon has been known for decades, it has mostly been studied in older, relatively small architectures and rarely in natural-language domains.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

Detectable Only Where It Is Confounded: What Verified Duplication Counts Say About Membership Evidence in Language Models

The paper investigates whether language models can identify sentences from their training data by using exact duplication counts from publicly released corpora for two model families, OLMo‑2 and Pythia. It finds that for typical duplication levels, models show only a weak trace of exposure, with a rank correlation near –0.08, and that strong signals only appear when a sentence appears roughly a thousand times, at which point fame rather than memory dominates. The study also demonstrates that common membership tests can be misleading, as changing a single word does not alter the model’s preference, and that controlling for register can significantly improve detector performance.

By Arman Nik Khah
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 25

What a Cross-Model Fixed-Point Census Can and Cannot Arbitrate About Repetition

The paper investigates neural text degeneration by measuring the fixed‑point structure of short‑window argmax maps across 17 pretrained models, using 96 random two‑token starts without prompts. It finds a stable four‑way classification that varies across model families and scales, with some models funneling to a single endpoint token while others do not, and shows that this behavior is not solely determined by training data or corpus frequency. The study demonstrates that repetition phenomena are not uniformly explained by either training data or network architecture alone, highlighting the complexity of neural text generation dynamics.

By Nicol\'as Vera Z\'u\~niga