In plain words: Built a cleaned collection of about 9.5 billion tokens of math text, with junk and repeated copies removed and any text matching test questions deleted, to teach models math. Models trained further on it scored higher on math reasoning tests than before.
Abstract · MathPile: A Billion-Token-Scale Pretraining Corpus for Math
High-quality, large-scale corpora are the cornerstone of building foundation models. In this work, we introduce MathPile, a diverse and high-quality math-centric corpus comprising about 9.5 billion tokens. Throughout its creation, we adhered to the principle of "less is more", firmly believing in the supremacy of data quality over quantity, even in the pre-training phase. Our meticulous data collection and processing efforts included a complex suite of preprocessing, prefiltering, language identification, cleaning, filtering, and deduplication, ensuring the high quality of our corpus. Furthermore, we performed data contamination detection on downstream benchmark test sets to eliminate duplicates and conducted continual pre-training experiments, booting the performance on common mathematical reasoning benchmarks. We aim for our MathPile to boost language models' mathematical reasoning abilities and open-source its different versions and processing scripts to advance the field.
Zengzhi Wang, Xuefeng Li, Rui Xia, Pengfei Liu
arXiv:2312.17120 · cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG · submitted Dec 28, 2023 · updated Oct 29, 2024
abstract · pdf · html · 43 pages. Accepted by NeurIPS 2024. https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/MathPile/