Generating Pretraining Tokens from Organic Data for Data-Bound Scaling

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Yu, Zichun, Xiong, Chenyan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866917507441360896
author Yu, Zichun
Xiong, Chenyan
author_facet Yu, Zichun
Xiong, Chenyan
contents LLM pretraining is shifting from a compute-bound to a data-bound regime, where available human (organic) text falls far short of scaling demands. However, reaching the data-bound regime does not mean the model has fully utilized its organic corpus. In this paper, we introduce SynPro, a synthetic data generation framework that helps LLMs more thoroughly learn from limited organic data. SynPro applies two operations, rephrasing and reformat, that present the same organic source in diverse forms to facilitate deeper learning without introducing external information. Both generators are optimized via reinforcement learning with quality, faithfulness, and data influence rewards, and are continuously updated as pretraining plateaus to target content the model has yet to absorb. We pretrain 400M and 1.1B models with 10% of their Chinchilla-optimal tokens (0.8B and 2.2B) from DCLM-Baseline, reflecting a realistic data-bound regime in frontier pretraining. Our results reveal that organic data is significantly underutilized by standard repetition: SynPro unlocks 3.7-5.2x the effective tokens of repetition, even surpassing the non-data-bound oracle that trains on equivalent unique data at the 1.1B scale. Analyses confirm that faithful, model-aware synthesis sustains data-bound scaling without causing distribution collapse. We open-source our code at https://github.com/cxcscmu/SynPro.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_17849
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Generating Pretraining Tokens from Organic Data for Data-Bound Scaling
Yu, Zichun
Xiong, Chenyan
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
LLM pretraining is shifting from a compute-bound to a data-bound regime, where available human (organic) text falls far short of scaling demands. However, reaching the data-bound regime does not mean the model has fully utilized its organic corpus. In this paper, we introduce SynPro, a synthetic data generation framework that helps LLMs more thoroughly learn from limited organic data. SynPro applies two operations, rephrasing and reformat, that present the same organic source in diverse forms to facilitate deeper learning without introducing external information. Both generators are optimized via reinforcement learning with quality, faithfulness, and data influence rewards, and are continuously updated as pretraining plateaus to target content the model has yet to absorb. We pretrain 400M and 1.1B models with 10% of their Chinchilla-optimal tokens (0.8B and 2.2B) from DCLM-Baseline, reflecting a realistic data-bound regime in frontier pretraining. Our results reveal that organic data is significantly underutilized by standard repetition: SynPro unlocks 3.7-5.2x the effective tokens of repetition, even surpassing the non-data-bound oracle that trains on equivalent unique data at the 1.1B scale. Analyses confirm that faithful, model-aware synthesis sustains data-bound scaling without causing distribution collapse. We open-source our code at https://github.com/cxcscmu/SynPro.
title Generating Pretraining Tokens from Organic Data for Data-Bound Scaling
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17849