Beyond URLs: Metadata Diversity and Position for Efficient LLM Pretraining

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Fan, Dongyang, Hashemi, Diba, Karimireddy, Sai Praneeth, Jaggi, Martin
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Fan, Dongyang
Hashemi, Diba
Karimireddy, Sai Praneeth
Jaggi, Martin
author_facet Fan, Dongyang
Hashemi, Diba
Karimireddy, Sai Praneeth
Jaggi, Martin
contents Incorporating metadata in Large Language Models (LLMs) pretraining has recently emerged as a promising approach to accelerate training. However prior work highlighted only one useful signal-URLs, leaving open the question of whether other forms of metadata could yield greater benefits. In this study, we investigate a wider range of metadata types and find other types of metadata, such as fine-grained indicators of document quality that can also accelerate pretraining when prepended. We identify a common feature among effective metadata: they encode information at a finer granularity. We further introduce metadata appending as a means of improving training efficiency, where predicting an appropriate metadata as auxiliary task can help speed up pretraining. In addition, learnable meta-tokens trained with masked loss can recover part of the speedup by inducing quality-aware latent structure. Using probing, we analyze latent representations to understand how metadata shapes learning. Together, these results yield practical guidelines for integrating metadata to improve both the efficiency and effectiveness of LLM pretraining.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_21613
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Beyond URLs: Metadata Diversity and Position for Efficient LLM Pretraining
Fan, Dongyang
Hashemi, Diba
Karimireddy, Sai Praneeth
Jaggi, Martin
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Incorporating metadata in Large Language Models (LLMs) pretraining has recently emerged as a promising approach to accelerate training. However prior work highlighted only one useful signal-URLs, leaving open the question of whether other forms of metadata could yield greater benefits. In this study, we investigate a wider range of metadata types and find other types of metadata, such as fine-grained indicators of document quality that can also accelerate pretraining when prepended. We identify a common feature among effective metadata: they encode information at a finer granularity. We further introduce metadata appending as a means of improving training efficiency, where predicting an appropriate metadata as auxiliary task can help speed up pretraining. In addition, learnable meta-tokens trained with masked loss can recover part of the speedup by inducing quality-aware latent structure. Using probing, we analyze latent representations to understand how metadata shapes learning. Together, these results yield practical guidelines for integrating metadata to improve both the efficiency and effectiveness of LLM pretraining.
title Beyond URLs: Metadata Diversity and Position for Efficient LLM Pretraining
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.21613