在数据有限时,如何混合稀有与通用数据来训练语言模型。
Scaling Laws for Mixture Pretraining Under Data Constraints

- 通过2000多次实验,发现重复使用目标数据15-20次能提升性能。
- 混合训练比单一数据源更容忍重复,且性能随重复次数先升后降。
- 提出可调的缩放定律,指导资源受限下的数据混合策略。
随着语言模型规模增大,所需数据量也持续增长,但许多目标数据源(如低资源语言或专业领域)本身规模有限。常见做法是将稀缺但重要的目标数据与大量通用数据混合训练,这带来根本性权衡:目标数据过少会削弱模型对目标领域的学习,过多则导致重复示例过多,收益递减甚至过拟合。本文基于超过2000次语言模型训练实验,涵盖多种模型与目标数据集规模,以及多语言、领域特定和质量筛选等数据类型,发现重复是影响目标领域性能的核心因素。混合训练对重复的容忍度远高于单源训练,稀缺目标语料可重复使用15-20次,最优重复次数取决于目标数据大小、计算预算与模型规模。进一步提出一种考虑重复价值衰减与通用数据正则化作用的重复感知混合缩放定律,提供了一种系统化的方法来确定有效混合配置,为数据受限场景下的预训练提供实用建议。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
As language models scale, the amount of data they require grows -- yet many target data sources, such as low-resource languages or specialized domains, are inherently limited in size. A common strategy is to mix this scarce but valuable target data with abundant generic data, which presents a fundamental trade-off: too little target data in the mixture underexposes the model to the target domain, while too much target data repeats the same examples excessively, yielding diminishing returns and eventual overfitting. We study this trade-off across more than 2,000 language-model training runs spanning multiple model and target dataset sizes, as well as several data types, including multilingual, domain-specific, and quality-filtered mixtures. Across all settings, we find that repetition is a central driver of target-domain performance, and that mixture training tolerates much higher repetition than single-source training: scarce target corpora can be reused 15-20 times, with the optimal number of repetitions depending on the target data size, compute budget, and model scale. Next, we introduce a repetition-aware mixture scaling law that accounts for the decreasing value of repeated target tokens and the regularizing role of generic data. Optimizing the scaling law provides a principled way to compute effective mixture configurations, yielding practical mixture recommendations for pretraining under data constraints.
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