arXiv Machine Learning

FineInstructions: Scaling Synthetic Instructions to Pre-Training Scale

arXiv:2601. 22146v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Due to limited supervised training data, large language models (LLMs) are typically pre-trained via a self-supervised "predict the next word" objective on a vast amount of unstructured text data.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 31

How Can We Synthesize High-Quality Pretraining Data? A Systematic Study of Prompt Design, Generator Model, and Source Data

arXiv:2604. 13977v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Synthetic data is a standard component in training large language models, yet systematic comparisons across design dimensions, including rephrasing strategy, generator model, and source data, remain absent.

By Joel Niklaus, Atsuki Yamaguchi, Michal \v{S}tef\'anik, Guilherme Penedo, Hynek Kydl\'i\v{c}ek, Elie Bakouch, Lewis Tunstall, Edward Emanuel Beeching, Thibaud Frere, Colin Raffel, Leandro von Werra, Thomas Wolf
arXiv AI
Sep 3

DKL: Decoupled Knowledge Learning for Instruction-Tuned Language Models

The paper introduces DKL, a method for adding new knowledge to instruction‑tuned language models without compromising their instruction‑following abilities. DKL performs extended pre‑training on a base LLM to embed knowledge, then merges these weights into the instruction‑tuned model, avoiding costly instruction fine‑tuning. Experiments show DKL raises RAG accuracy from 54.17% to 79.26% on retrieval failure cases while using far less training data than previous approaches.

By Kushagra Bhushan, Meghanadh Pulivarthi, Sai Krishna Reddy Sathi, Gaurav Pandey, Sonam Gupta, Vineet Kumar, Jaydeep Sen, Yatin Nandwani, Sachindra Joshi, Dinesh Raghu
arXiv Machine Learning
4d ago

It's All Training: A Fully Synthetic Single-Stage Recipe for LLMs

arXiv:2609.37891v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current pre-training datasets are derived from web crawls, with all their issues, and were not designed to support mid- and post-training pipelines--...

By Pierre-Carl Langlais, Pieter Delobelle, Yannick Detrois, Pavel Chizhov, Carlos Rosas-Hinostroza, Neil Si Smail, Benjamin Burtin, Hanna Shcharbakova, Ivan Yamshchikov, Anastasia Stasenko
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 2

DKL: Decoupled Knowledge Learning for Instruction-Tuned Language Models

The paper introduces DKL, a method that decouples knowledge learning from instruction tuning in language models. Instead of fine‑tuning the instruction‑tuned model directly, DKL first extends pre‑training on a base model to embed new knowledge, then merges these weights into the instruction‑tuned model, preserving its instruction‑following abilities. Experiments show DKL raises RAG accuracy from 54.17 % to 79.26 % on retrieval failures, outperforming prior methods while using far less training data.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

Unfolding Scientific Papers into Multi-Turn Generation Trajectories for Continued Pre-Training

arXiv:2608. 25826v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A recent line of synthetic-data work reconstructs the thinking behind existing text rather than rewriting the text itself, but it operates on short web passages, recovers only local thoughts, and leaves the structure of whole documents untouched.

By Qiankai Xu, Qiguang Chen, Zixin Su, Wenhao Huang, Yue Gao, Jiaheng Liu, Ge Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

RePro: Training Language Models to Faithfully Recycle the Web for Pretraining

RePro is a web‑recycling technique that trains a small language model (as little as 1 B parameters) with reinforcement learning to produce high‑quality, faithful rephrasings of pretraining data. The method uses one quality reward and three faithfulness rewards to preserve core semantics and structure while converting organic data into better training examples. Experiments show that RePro boosts downstream accuracy by 3.7–14.5 % over organic‑only baselines and improves data efficiency 2–3×, outperforming prior prompting‑based recycling approaches.

By Zichun Yu, Chenyan Xiong
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

Synthesizing Instruction-Tuning Datasets with Contrastive Decoding

The paper introduces CoDIT, a contrastive decoding technique that separates instruction-following behavior from pre-trained world knowledge in large language models. By generating responses that emphasize post-training instruction capabilities while suppressing shared pre-trained knowledge, CoDIT creates instruction-tuning datasets that lead to consistently better model performance than directly generated responses or existing public datasets. The authors also provide theoretical and empirical evidence that CoDIT effectively distills instruction-tuning knowledge from model parameters into text, facilitating cross-architecture transfer.

By Tatsuya Ichinose, Youmi Ma, Masanari Oi, Ryuto Koike, Naoaki Okazaki