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A Bitter Lesson for Data Filtering (arxiv.org)
5 points by nujan_dev 15 days ago | hide | past | pdf | 1 comment on HN

In plain words: They tested whether filtering out low-quality text helps when training large models with lots of computing power but limited data. With enough training, skipping the filter worked best, and the supposedly bad data actually improved results.

Abstract

We investigate data filtering for large model pretraining via new scaling studies that target the high compute, data-scarce regime. In spite of an apparently common belief that filtering data to include only high-quality information is essential, our experiments suggest that with enough compute, the best data filter is no data filter. We find that sufficiently trained large parameter models not only tolerate low-quality and distractor data, but in fact benefit from nominally ``poor'' data.

Christopher Mohri, John Duchi, Tatsunori Hashimoto
arXiv:2605.19407 · cs.LG, cs.AI · submitted May 19, 2026
abstract · pdf · html

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Large models don't just tolerate noisy or nominally "low-quality" web data but this paper suggests that they benefit from the distributional entropy in it. Over-curated datasets artificially compress the representation manifold, starving the model of the edge cases needed for robust generalization.