Target-Aware Language Modeling via Granular Data Sampling

Ernie Chang, Pin-Jie Lin, Yang Li, Changsheng Zhao, Daeil Kim, Rastislav Rabatin, Zechun Liu, Yangyang Shi, Vikas Chandra


Abstract
Language model pretraining generally targets a broad range of use cases and incorporates data from diverse sources. However, there are instances where we desire a model that excels in specific areas without markedly compromising performance in other areas. A cost-effective and straightforward approach is sampling with low-dimensional data features, which allows selecting large-scale pretraining data for domain-specific use cases. In this work, we revisit importance sampling with n-gram features consisting of multi-granular tokens, which strikes a good balance between sentence compression and representation capabilities. We observed the sampled data to have a high correlation with the target downstream task performance *while preserving its effectiveness on other tasks*. This leads to the proposed data sampling paradigm where language models can be pretrained more efficiently on selected documents. On eight benchmarks we demonstrate with ~1% of the data, pretrained models perform on par with the full RefinedWeb data and outperform randomly selected samples for model sizes ranging from 125M to 1.5B.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.719
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
12927–12935
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.719
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ernie Chang, Pin-Jie Lin, Yang Li, Changsheng Zhao, Daeil Kim, Rastislav Rabatin, Zechun Liu, Yangyang Shi, and Vikas Chandra. 2024. Target-Aware Language Modeling via Granular Data Sampling. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 12927–12935, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Target-Aware Language Modeling via Granular Data Sampling (Chang et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.719.pdf