HuggingBrew: Brewing High-Quality Mid-Training Data from the HuggingFace Community Datasets

Han Zhang, Ningqi Chen, Xiao Liu, Zhenghao Lin, Yeyun Gong, Yan Lu, Hanfang Yang


Abstract
Data curation for large language models (LLMs) has been extensively studied for both the pre-training and post-training stages, yet the intermediate mid-training phase—bridging general pretraining and task-specific fine-tuning—remains critically underexplored. Most existing mid-training data for state-of-the-art models remains proprietary. Meanwhile, the Hugging Face platform hosts a huge amount of community-contributed datasets, yet no systematic effort has been made to refine this rich ecosystem into a unified high-quality corpus. We present HuggingBrew, a large-scale mid-training corpus constructed through a principled, multi-step curation pipeline applied to the massive publicly accessible Hugging Face datasets. The pipeline operates at two complementary granularities: dataset-level operations act on each dataset independently, while corpus-level operations are applied jointly across all retained corpus. We construct three progressively curated variants—\textsf{Draught}, \textsf{Craft}, and \textsf{Reserve}—containing 1.6T, 450B, and 40B tokens, respectively. Continual pretraining experiments under a 100B-token budget show that series yields substantial improvements over baselines across mathematical reasoning, general knowledge, and code generation, validating the untapped value of community-contributed data for mid-training.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.1519
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
32346–32365
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1519/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Han Zhang, Ningqi Chen, Xiao Liu, Zhenghao Lin, Yeyun Gong, Yan Lu, and Hanfang Yang. 2026. HuggingBrew: Brewing High-Quality Mid-Training Data from the HuggingFace Community Datasets. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 32346–32365, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
HuggingBrew: Brewing High-Quality Mid-Training Data from the HuggingFace Community Datasets (Zhang et al., Findings 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1519.pdf