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
arXiv:2606. 16246v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As AI labs approach a data ceiling where compute capacity outpaces the rate of new high-quality text generation, language model pretraining is shifting toward a data-constrained, compute-abundant regime that demands productive multi-epoch training on fixed corpora.
By Michael K. Chen, Xikun Zhang, Zhen Wang
arXiv:2607. 06772v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learned optimization aims to improve upon hand-designed optimizers (e.
By Xiaolong Huang, Benjamin Th\'erien, James Harrison, Eugene Belilovsky
arXiv:2606. 03608v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Test-time reinforcement learning has emerged as a promising paradigm for enhancing the complex reasoning abilities of large language models in a completely label-free manner.
By Jiahui Li, Jianfeng Shan, Wenpei Chen, Shunyu Wu, Jian Lou, Wenjie Feng, Dan Li, See-Kiong Ng
arXiv:2606. 24679v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Data preparation pipelines improve data quality in machine learning by transforming raw tables into learning-ready data through sequential cleaning and feature transformation operators.
By Kunyu Ni, Lei Cao, Jie He, Xiaotong Zhang, Jianfeng Jin, Junyu Dong, Yanwei Yu
Learned optimization aims to improve upon hand-designed optimizers (e. g.
arXiv:2505.19893v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Large language model pretraining is compute-intensive, yet many tokens contribute marginally to learning, resulting in inefficiency. We introduce E...
By Melis Ilayda Bal, Volkan Cevher, Michael Muehlebach
arXiv:2506. 05233v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Sequence modeling is currently dominated by causal transformer architectures that use softmax self-attention.
By Johannes von Oswald, Nino Scherrer, Seijin Kobayashi, Luca Versari, Songlin Yang, Sarthak Mittal, Maximilian Schlegel, Kaitlin Maile, Yanick Schimpf, Oliver Sieberling, Alexander Meulemans, Rif A. Saurous, Guillaume Lajoie, Charlotte Frenkel, Razvan Pascanu, Blaise Ag\"uera y Arcas, Jo\~ao Sacramento
ExpTest is an autonomous learning‑rate controller that uses the training loss curve as an online signal to perform sequential statistical tests on theoretically motivated windows, detecting convergent behavior and triggering learning‑rate reductions. It combines a covariance‑based initial learning‑rate estimate, curvature‑motivated window sizing, and a two‑phase test‑driven decay, relying on the approximately exponential decay predicted under linearized network dynamics. Experiments on regression, classification, forecasting, and natural‑language tasks across various architectures show that ExpTest achieves competitive performance compared to hand‑tuned SGD baselines and recent learning‑rate‑free methods, without requiring manual initial learning‑rate selection or predefined scheduling.
By Zan Chaudhry, Naoko Mizuno
arXiv:2506. 14126v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern deep learning is increasingly characterized by the use of open-weight foundation models that can be fine-tuned on specialized datasets.
By Stefan Horoi, Guy Wolf, Eugene Belilovsky, Gintare Karolina Dziugaite
arXiv:2605. 27991v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Gradient-flow optimization is usually viewed as an algorithmic procedure for minimizing empirical loss, with training duration selected by validation or heuristic early-stopping rules.
By Minhao Yao, Ruoyu Wang, Xihong Lin, Lin Liu, Zhonghua Liu
arXiv:2601. 22108v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continued pretraining is optimized with fixed self-supervised tasks but selected by downstream performance, creating a coarse feedback loop in which practitioners evaluate checkpoints, change data mixtures or objectives, and restart runs, while individual updates remain blind to target capabilities.
By Shuqi Ke, Giulia Fanti