arXiv AI

Anytime Pretraining: Horizon-Free Learning-Rate Schedules with Weight Averaging

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

Deriving Scaling Laws for OpenEuroLLM Models: Learning Rate, Batch Size and Loss

The paper investigates how learning rate and batch size scale when pretraining dense large language models on English‑prevalent corpora, examining both jointly optimal and marginal evolutions across model capacity and data size. It explores the benefits of a Warmup‑Stable‑Decay learning‑rate schedule, assessing whether optimal hyperparameters transfer between stable and decay phases, and evaluates loss scaling forms that capture interactions between model capacity and dataset size. The study provides a baseline scaling procedure and releases the full set of pretraining runs for future OpenEuroLLM development.

By Niccol\`o Ajroldi, Diana Alexandra Onutu, Haider Al-Tahan, J\"org Franke, Sampo Pyysalo, Jenia Jitsev, Aaron Klein
arXiv Computation and Language
4d ago

Data Strategies for Large Language Models: A Unified Perspective on the Training Lifecycle

The paper reviews data strategies for large language models, emphasizing that data strategy—selecting, weighting, and scheduling training data—determines model capabilities within a fixed data budget. It treats high‑quality data as having training‑dependent utility, varying with the target objective, model, and training state. The authors organize existing methods by decision granularity, model dependence, and temporal adaptivity, comparing their computational costs and empirical support, and note limited evidence for transfer across model scales and end‑to‑end cost parity.

By Yuanjian Xu, Jianing Hao, Tianze Sun, Yongyao Duan, Sam Chen, Jinyi Han, Wanbo Zhang, Yuxuan Sun, Guang Zhang, Zhong Li
arXiv AI
Aug 20

Demystifying Training-Time Augmentation for Data-Constrained Language Model Pretraining

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 AI
Aug 11

Beyond Static Models: An Evolving Framework for Continual Learning in Large Language Models across Training Stages

arXiv:2603. 12658v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continual learning (CL) has emerged as a pivotal paradigm to enable large language models (LLMs) to dynamically adapt to evolving knowledge and sequential tasks while mitigating catastrophic forgetting, a critical limitation of the static pre-training paradigm inherent to modern LLMs.

By Hongyang Chen, Zhongwu Sun, Hongfei Ye, Kunchi Li, Xuemin Lin
arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

Large Diffusion Models Need More Than EMA

The paper examines whether exponential moving average (EMA) is uniquely suited for training large diffusion models or if other optimization strategies can be more effective. It shows that constant‑step averaging has inherent limitations, while learning‑rate decay and Schedule‑Free optimization provide stronger convergence guarantees under nonconvex assumptions. Empirical results indicate that combining decay with EMA yields modest gains, but Schedule‑Free consistently outperforms EMA alone, reducing parameter variability while maintaining late‑stage progress and improving generation quality across multiple diffusion settings.

By Chuyu Hu, Huanran Chen, Shitong Shao, Yinpeng Dong
arXiv AI
Jun 16

Data Augmentations for Data-Constrained Language Model Pretraining

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