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Rephrasing the Web: A Recipe for Compute and Data-Efficient Language Modeling (arxiv.org)
3 points by jasondavies on Jan 30, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | 1 comment on HN

In plain words: Messy web pages are rewritten into clean styles, like Wikipedia or question-answer form, by a ready-made chat model, and models train on both versions. On noisy web data this matched the usual training quality about three times sooner and answered questions more accurately.

Abstract

Large language models are trained on massive scrapes of the web, which are often unstructured, noisy, and poorly phrased. Current scaling laws show that learning from such data requires an abundance of both compute and data, which grows with the size of the model being trained. This is infeasible both because of the large compute costs and duration associated with pre-training, and the impending scarcity of high-quality data on the web. In this work, we propose Web Rephrase Augmented Pre-training ($\textbf{WRAP}$) that uses an off-the-shelf instruction-tuned model prompted to paraphrase documents on the web in specific styles such as "like Wikipedia" or in "question-answer format" to jointly pre-train LLMs on real and synthetic rephrases. First, we show that using WRAP on the C4 dataset, which is naturally noisy, speeds up pre-training by $\sim3x$. At the same pre-training compute budget, it improves perplexity by more than 10% on average across different subsets of the Pile, and improves zero-shot question answer accuracy across 13 tasks by more than 2%. Second, we investigate the impact of the re-phrasing style on the performance of the model, offering insights into how the composition of the training data can impact the performance of LLMs in OOD settings. Our gains are attributed to the fact that re-phrased synthetic data has higher utility than just real data because it (i) incorporates style diversity that closely reflects downstream evaluation style, and (ii) has higher 'quality' than web-scraped data.

Pratyush Maini, Skyler Seto, He Bai, David Grangier, Yizhe Zhang, Navdeep Jaitly
arXiv:2401.16380 · cs.CL · submitted Jan 29, 2024
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This paper is well written. The results are pretty wild. They observed some amazing reduction in training resources required to achieve similar benchmarks to models trained on conventional data:

> We observe that even at the first checkpoint (10B tokens) of WRAP training, the average perplexity of the LLM on the Pile is lower than that achieved by pre-training on C4 for 15 checkpoints. This suggests a 15x pre-training speed-up.