CoLoR-Filter: Conditional Loss Reduction Filtering for Targeted Language Model Pre-training

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Main Authors: Brandfonbrener, David, Zhang, Hanlin, Kirsch, Andreas, Schwarz, Jonathan Richard, Kakade, Sham
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Brandfonbrener, David
Zhang, Hanlin
Kirsch, Andreas
Schwarz, Jonathan Richard
Kakade, Sham
author_facet Brandfonbrener, David
Zhang, Hanlin
Kirsch, Andreas
Schwarz, Jonathan Richard
Kakade, Sham
contents Selecting high-quality data for pre-training is crucial in shaping the downstream task performance of language models. A major challenge lies in identifying this optimal subset, a problem generally considered intractable, thus necessitating scalable and effective heuristics. In this work, we propose a data selection method, CoLoR-Filter (Conditional Loss Reduction Filtering), which leverages an empirical Bayes-inspired approach to derive a simple and computationally efficient selection criterion based on the relative loss values of two auxiliary models. In addition to the modeling rationale, we evaluate CoLoR-Filter empirically on two language modeling tasks: (1) selecting data from C4 for domain adaptation to evaluation on Books and (2) selecting data from C4 for a suite of downstream multiple-choice question answering tasks. We demonstrate favorable scaling both as we subselect more aggressively and using small auxiliary models to select data for large target models. As one headline result, CoLoR-Filter data selected using a pair of 150m parameter auxiliary models can train a 1.2b parameter target model to match a 1.2b parameter model trained on 25b randomly selected tokens with 25x less data for Books and 11x less data for the downstream tasks. Code: https://github.com/davidbrandfonbrener/color-filter-olmo Filtered data: https://huggingface.co/datasets/davidbrandfonbrener/color-filtered-c4
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_10670
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CoLoR-Filter: Conditional Loss Reduction Filtering for Targeted Language Model Pre-training
Brandfonbrener, David
Zhang, Hanlin
Kirsch, Andreas
Schwarz, Jonathan Richard
Kakade, Sham
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Selecting high-quality data for pre-training is crucial in shaping the downstream task performance of language models. A major challenge lies in identifying this optimal subset, a problem generally considered intractable, thus necessitating scalable and effective heuristics. In this work, we propose a data selection method, CoLoR-Filter (Conditional Loss Reduction Filtering), which leverages an empirical Bayes-inspired approach to derive a simple and computationally efficient selection criterion based on the relative loss values of two auxiliary models. In addition to the modeling rationale, we evaluate CoLoR-Filter empirically on two language modeling tasks: (1) selecting data from C4 for domain adaptation to evaluation on Books and (2) selecting data from C4 for a suite of downstream multiple-choice question answering tasks. We demonstrate favorable scaling both as we subselect more aggressively and using small auxiliary models to select data for large target models. As one headline result, CoLoR-Filter data selected using a pair of 150m parameter auxiliary models can train a 1.2b parameter target model to match a 1.2b parameter model trained on 25b randomly selected tokens with 25x less data for Books and 11x less data for the downstream tasks. Code: https://github.com/davidbrandfonbrener/color-filter-olmo Filtered data: https://huggingface.co/datasets/davidbrandfonbrener/color-filtered-c4
title CoLoR-Filter: Conditional Loss Reduction Filtering for Targeted Language Model Pre-training
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.10670