In plain words: Instead of gluing texts together and chopping them at fixed lengths, this packs text with overlapping windows that keep context intact, then fits short pieces into bins just long enough to avoid waste. It beat the usual fixed-length packing in 99% of tested settings.
Abstract · Improving Continual Pre-training Through Seamless Data Packing
Continual pre-training has demonstrated significant potential in enhancing model performance, particularly in domain-specific scenarios. The most common approach for packing data before continual pre-training involves concatenating input texts and splitting them into fixed-length sequences. While straightforward and efficient, this method often leads to excessive truncation and context discontinuity, which can hinder model performance. To address these issues, we explore the potential of data engineering to enhance continual pre-training, particularly its impact on model performance and efficiency. We propose Seamless Packing (SP), a novel data packing strategy aimed at preserving contextual information more effectively and enhancing model performance. Our approach employs a sliding window technique in the first stage that synchronizes overlapping tokens across consecutive sequences, ensuring better continuity and contextual coherence. In the second stage, we adopt a First-Fit-Decreasing algorithm to pack shorter texts into bins slightly larger than the target sequence length, thereby minimizing padding and truncation. Empirical evaluations across various model architectures and corpus domains demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, outperforming baseline method in 99% of all settings. Code is available at https://github.com/Infernus-WIND/Seamless-Packing.
Ruicheng Yin, Xuan Gao, Changze Lv, Xiaohua Wang, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuanjing Huang
arXiv:2505.22018 · cs.CL · submitted May 28, 2025 · updated May 29, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted to ACL 2025 Findings