Scaling Parameter-Constrained Language Models with Quality Data

Abstract

Scaling laws in language modeling traditionally quantify training loss as a function of dataset size and model parameters, providing compute-optimal estimates but often neglecting the impact of data quality on model generalization.In this paper, we extend the conventional understanding of scaling law by offering a microscopic view of data quality within the original formulation – effective training tokens – which we posit to be a critical determinant of performance for parameter-constrained language models.Specifically, we formulate the proposed term of effective training tokens to be a combination of two readily-computed indicators of text:(i) text diversity and (ii) syntheticity as measured by a teacher model.We pretrained over 200 models of 25M to 1.5B parameters on a diverse set of sampled, synthetic data, and estimated the constants that relate text quality, model size, training tokens, and eight reasoning task accuracy scores.We demonstrated the estimated constants yield +0.83 Pearson correlation with true accuracies, and analyze it in scenarios involving widely-used data techniques such as data sampling and synthesis which aim to improve data quality.