Maximize Your Data's Potential: Enhancing LLM Accuracy with Two-Phase Pretraining

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Feng, Steven, Prabhumoye, Shrimai, Kong, Kezhi, Su, Dan, Patwary, Mostofa, Shoeybi, Mohammad, Catanzaro, Bryan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866929641901522944
author Feng, Steven
Prabhumoye, Shrimai
Kong, Kezhi
Su, Dan
Patwary, Mostofa
Shoeybi, Mohammad
Catanzaro, Bryan
author_facet Feng, Steven
Prabhumoye, Shrimai
Kong, Kezhi
Su, Dan
Patwary, Mostofa
Shoeybi, Mohammad
Catanzaro, Bryan
contents Pretraining large language models effectively requires strategic data selection, blending and ordering. However, key details about data mixtures especially their scalability to longer token horizons and larger model sizes remain underexplored due to limited disclosure by model developers. To address this, we formalize the concept of two-phase pretraining and conduct an extensive systematic study on how to select and mix data to maximize model accuracies for the two phases. Our findings illustrate that a two-phase approach for pretraining outperforms random data ordering and natural distribution of tokens by 3.4% and 17% on average accuracies. We provide in-depth guidance on crafting optimal blends based on quality of the data source and the number of epochs to be seen. We propose to design blends using downsampled data at a smaller scale of 1T tokens and then demonstrate effective scaling of our approach to larger token horizon of 15T tokens and larger model size of 25B model size. These insights provide a series of steps practitioners can follow to design and scale their data blends.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_15285
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Maximize Your Data's Potential: Enhancing LLM Accuracy with Two-Phase Pretraining
Feng, Steven
Prabhumoye, Shrimai
Kong, Kezhi
Su, Dan
Patwary, Mostofa
Shoeybi, Mohammad
Catanzaro, Bryan
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Pretraining large language models effectively requires strategic data selection, blending and ordering. However, key details about data mixtures especially their scalability to longer token horizons and larger model sizes remain underexplored due to limited disclosure by model developers. To address this, we formalize the concept of two-phase pretraining and conduct an extensive systematic study on how to select and mix data to maximize model accuracies for the two phases. Our findings illustrate that a two-phase approach for pretraining outperforms random data ordering and natural distribution of tokens by 3.4% and 17% on average accuracies. We provide in-depth guidance on crafting optimal blends based on quality of the data source and the number of epochs to be seen. We propose to design blends using downsampled data at a smaller scale of 1T tokens and then demonstrate effective scaling of our approach to larger token horizon of 15T tokens and larger model size of 25B model size. These insights provide a series of steps practitioners can follow to design and scale their data blends.
title Maximize Your Data's Potential: Enhancing LLM Accuracy with Two-Phase Pretraining
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.15285