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. We propose Compute-Data (CD) scaling laws, a unified framework that bridges compute-optimal scaling, where data scales freely with compute, and data-optimal scaling, where the corpus is fixed while compute can grow without bound.
The paper introduces SynPro, a synthetic data generation framework that augments limited organic text for large language model pretraining by applying rephrasing and reformatting operations. SynPro’s generators are optimized with reinforcement learning rewards for quality, faithfulness, and data influence, and are updated continuously as training plateaus. Experiments on 400M, 1.1B, and 2B models show that SynPro can unlock 3.4–5.2× the effective tokens of standard repetition, even outperforming a non‑data‑bound oracle at larger scales.
By Zichun Yu, Chenyan Xiong
arXiv:2606. 01155v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scaling laws for dense LLMs under infinite data are well explored, but how sparsity interacts with limited data is not.
By Boqian Wu, Qiao Xiao, Patrik Okanovic, Tomasz Sternal, Maurice van Keulen, Mykola Pechenizkiy, Elena Mocanu, Torsten Hoefler, Decebal Constantin Mocanu
arXiv:2606. 06888v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Classical scaling laws for language model pretraining balance model size against training dataset size under a fixed compute budget, assuming abundant data and a single pass over the corpus.
By Zhiwei Xu, Shihao Wu, Hanseul Cho, Wei Hu, Yixin Wang
arXiv:2606. 03938v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-epoch training is becoming the standard now that compute is growing faster than the supply of high-quality text.
By Bishwas Mandal, Shmuel Berman, Akshay Vegesna, Samip Dahal
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:2602. 15327v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Machine learning model performance improvements tend to arise from competition and application.
By Hanlin Zhang, Jikai Jin, Vasilis Syrgkanis, Sham Kakade
The paper investigates training-time data augmentation as a regularizer for autoregressive language model pretraining in data‑constrained, compute‑abundant settings. It introduces three orthogonal augmentation categories—token‑level noise, sequence permutations, and target offset prediction—and shows through systematic ablations that each category delays overfitting and reduces validation loss, with random token replacement performing best individually. Combining augmentation categories further lowers the minimum validation loss, demonstrating that such augmentations mitigate data inefficiency in autoregressive pretraining.
By Michael K. Chen, Xikun Zhang, Fan Bai, Zhengding Hu, Zhen Wang
The paper introduces a new closed‑form scaling law that extends Chinchilla’s original formula to handle data‑constrained regimes. It decomposes loss into undercapacity, undertraining, and overfitting components, saturating between an irreducible loss and an uninformed baseline. The authors validate the model on diverse architectures and domains, achieving state‑of‑the‑art RMSE across multiple LLM scaling‑law grids and enabling cost‑aware training allocations.
By Christopher M. Bryant, Hao Liu
arXiv:2608. 20061v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures significantly expand model capacity without a proportional increase in computational cost.
By Nayeon Kim, Hojin Lee, Yunju Bak, Jaesun Park, Boseop Kim
arXiv:2606. 10706v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Resource constraints increasingly determine what can be trained, fine-tuned, and deployed in large language models (LLMs), yet efficiency is often studied through isolated techniques rather than as an interacting system of limits.
By Vanessa Schmidt, Huy Hoang Nguyen, C\'edric Jung, Shirin Salehi, Anke Schmeink
arXiv:2605. 04215v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion-based Large Language Models (D-LLMs) represent a promising frontier in generative AI, offering fully parallel token generation that can lead to significant throughput advantages and superior GPU utilization over the traditional autoregressive paradigm.
By Michael Rottoli, Subhankar Roy, Stefano Paraboschi