模型越大,语义重复数据越像完全重复,影响训练效果。
Scale Dependent Data Duplication
- 用嵌入相似度分析发现:大模型对语义相同文本的梯度更一致。
- 百亿级语料中最近邻相似度显著上升,表明语义碰撞加速。
- 小模型容忍重复数据,大模型则因重复产生严重性能下降。
预训练中的数据重复会损害泛化能力并导致记忆,传统去重方法在网页规模下面临挑战。本文发现,随着模型能力增强,语义等价文档(如翻译)的交叉熵损失梯度趋于对齐,而小模型仅反映表面相似性。我们使用 EmbeddingGemma-300m 对 1.92 亿条 FineWeb-Edu-Dedup 文档进行嵌入,发现中等语料规模下最近邻余弦相似度符合各向同性幂律基线,但当语料量达数百亿词时,相似度急剧升高,表明语义碰撞加速。控制实验显示,在有限唯一文档池中以替换采样方式预训练,小模型仅轻微退化,而大模型损失迅速上升,打破简单缩放规律。我们推导出显式缩放定律,帮助从业者评估语义唯一性不足带来的偏差。本研究揭示并解决了未被充分关注的尺度依赖问题,提升大规模预训练预测精度。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Data duplication during pretraining can degrade generalization and lead to memorization, motivating aggressive deduplication pipelines. However, at web scale, it is unclear what constitutes a ``duplicate'': beyond surface-form matches, semantically equivalent documents (e.g. translations) may induce redundant training signals once models become sufficiently capable. Practically, this means that semantic duplicates operate increasingly like exact duplicates during training. We present evidence that duplication is scale-dependent in two ways. First, as model capability increases, cross-entropy loss gradients for semantically equivalent documents become more aligned. Smaller models, by contrast, produce gradients that reflect surface similarity (e.g., shared tokens) rather than semantic similarity. Second, we embedded all 192 million FineWeb-Edu-Dedup documents using EmbeddingGemma-300m. For moderate corpus sizes, the cosine similarity between nearest-neighbors follows an isotropic power law baseline. However, as corpus size grows to hundreds of billions of tokens, the nearest-neighbor similarities deviate sharply, indicating accelerated semantic collisions. Finally, controlled pretraining on data sampled with replacement from pools of finite unique documents shows that limited uniqueness yields mild degradation for small models, but rapidly increasing loss penalties for larger models, breaking naive scaling extrapolation. We derive explicit scaling laws that allow practitioners to estimate deviation from expected scaling due to limited semantic uniqueness of the pretraining corpus. Our results identify and resolve an unstudied source of scale-dependence, allowing for more accurate prediction at scale.
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