arXiv:2601. 06649v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Research in machine learning has questioned whether increases in training token counts reliably produce proportional performance gains in large language models.
By Joe Dwyer
arXiv:2609.37169v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Mid-training equips pretrained large language models with specialized and reasoning capabilities, but the returns of this stage are bounded since add...
By Zhehao Huang, Changxin Tian, Qingyuan Yang, Kunlong Chen, Ziqi Liu, Zhiqiang Zhang, Xiaolin Huang, Jun Zhou
arXiv:2609.25482v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language model (LLM) pretraining conventionally returns the raw final iterate. This couples two design choices: the learning-rate schedule that g...
By Adam Ousherovitch, Yixin Wang
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: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
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
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: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
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:2606. 12117v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Benchmark scores often misrepresent a large language model's (LLM's) knowledge, because they rely, e.
By Selen Erkan, Bastian Boll, Kristian Kersting, Bj\"orn Deiseroth, Letitia Parcalabescu
arXiv:2605.21333v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Natively trained spiking language models must preserve information across time while operating through sparse binary activations, a combinati...
By Ting Liu
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