arXiv Computation and Language

Data Strategies for Large Language Models: A Unified Perspective on the Training Lifecycle

The paper reviews data strategies for large language models, emphasizing that data strategy—selecting, weighting, and scheduling training data—determines model capabilities within a fixed data budget. It treats high‑quality data as having training‑dependent utility, varying with the target objective, model, and training state. The authors organize existing methods by decision granularity, model dependence, and temporal adaptivity, comparing their computational costs and empirical support, and note limited evidence for transfer across model scales and end‑to‑end cost parity.

arXiv AI
5d ago

Scaling Point-in-Time Language Models: Enabling Economic Evaluation of Embeddings

The paper introduces point‑in‑time language models that are trained only on text available up to each calendar date, thereby eliminating lookahead bias that plagues standard large language models. By scaling decoder‑only transformers to 4 billion parameters and training on 1 trillion chronologically filtered tokens from FineWeb, the authors produce monthly checkpoints from 2013 to 2024 that achieve performance close to unconstrained models of similar size on common‑sense reasoning and language understanding tasks. Instruction fine‑tuning with LoRA further enhances downstream usability, and the authors release the full pipeline—including dataset construction, training infrastructure, and evaluation code—for reproducible research.

By Bryan Kelly, Semyon Malamud, Johannes Schwab, Teng Andrea Xu
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 7

Train Smarter, Not Longer: Memorization-Guided Data Reuse for Efficient LLM Training

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.

By Jingwei Zuo, Cong Zeng, Ilyas Chahed, Maksim Velikanov, Dhia Eddine Rhaiem, Pasquale Balsebre, Abhay Kumar, Younes Belkada, Hakim Hacid
arXiv AI
Jul 15

Scaling Point-in-Time Language Models

arXiv:2607. 11889v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models trained on unrestricted internet corpora inevitably embed information from the future, introducing lookahead bias that compromises the validity of backtests and causal inference in finance and the social sciences.

By Bryan Kelly, Semyon Malamud, Johannes Schwab, Teng Andrea Xu
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 Machine Learning
Aug 31

Deriving Scaling Laws for OpenEuroLLM Models: Learning Rate, Batch Size and Loss

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.

By Niccol\`o Ajroldi, Diana Alexandra Onutu, Haider Al-Tahan, J\"org Franke, Sampo Pyysalo, Jenia Jitsev, Aaron Klein
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 24

Index SLM Technical Report

arXiv:2607.09885v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present Index-1.9B, a series of open small language models developed at Bilibili. The series comprises four models: Index-1.9B-Base, a foundatio...

By Tianjiao Li, Lusheng Zhang, Shien He, Xiaojing Liu, Tianxing Yan, Mengran Yu, Ziang Cui, Kai Zhao, Xipeng Wang, Yang Liu, Yuxin Li