arXiv AI

A Quantitative Experimental Repeated Measures Study of Training Dynamics in a Small Llama Style Language Model Under a Compute-Aware Token Budget

arXiv:2606. 13370v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This study examines training dynamics in a small Llama-style language model trained under a fixed, compute-constrained token budget.

arXiv AI
Aug 11

Length-MAX Tokenizer for Language Models

arXiv:2511. 20849v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce a new tokenizer for language models that minimizes the average tokens per character, thereby reducing the number of tokens needed to represent text during training and to generate text during inference.

By Dong Dong, Weijie Su
arXiv Computation and Language
3d ago

DataFlex: A Unified Framework for Data-Centric Dynamic Training of Large Language Models

arXiv:2603.26164v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Data-centric training has emerged as a promising direction for improving large language models (LLMs) by optimizing not only model parameters...

By Hao Liang, Zhengyang Zhao, Mingrui Chen, Meiyi Qiang, Lu Ma, Rongyi Yu, Hengyi Feng, Shixuan Sun, Zimo Meng, Xiaochen Ma, Xuanlin Yang, Qifeng Cai, Ruichuan An, Bohan Zeng, Zhen Hao Wong, Chengyu Shen, Runming He, Zhaoyang Han, Yaowei Zheng, Fangcheng Fu, Conghui He, Bin Cui, Zhiyu Li, Weinan E, Wentao Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 19

TokEval: A Tokenizer Evaluation Suite

TokEval is a tokenizer evaluation suite that introduces metrics beyond traditional fertility and compression rate, capturing linguistically and structurally meaningful properties such as UTF‑8 character boundary integrity and digit place‑value alignment for mathematics. The authors validate these metrics by pretraining language models with varied tokenizers and measuring downstream performance on bits‑per‑byte and benchmarks covering linguistic understanding, mathematical reasoning, and code generation. Their results show that information‑theoretic metrics predict language modeling performance, while structure‑sensitive metrics correlate with task accuracy, suggesting TokEval can guide tokenizer selection more principledly.

By Clara Meister
arXiv AI
Sep 7

Don't Drop Dropout: Optimizing Layer Sparsity for Efficient LLM Training and Inference

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.

By Mostafa Elhoushi, Alex Pretko, Nolan Dey, Bin Claire Zhang, Gavia Gray, Gurpreet Gosal, Abdulrahman Mahmoud, Shane Bergsma, Joel Hestness
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
Aug 18

TokEval: A Tokenizer Evaluation Suite

TokEval is a tokenizer evaluation suite that introduces metrics beyond traditional fertility and compression rate, capturing linguistically and structurally meaningful properties such as UTF-8 character boundary integrity and digit place-value alignment for mathematics. The authors validate these metrics by conducting controlled language model pretraining experiments that vary tokenizer training data, pretokenization strategy, and training algorithm, then evaluate the models on bits-per-byte and benchmarks covering linguistic understanding, mathematical reasoning, and code generation. Results show that information-theoretic metrics predict language modeling performance, while structure-sensitive metrics correlate with task accuracy, suggesting TokEval can guide tokenizer selection more principledly.

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