Thinking Augmented Pre-training
Authors: name: Liang Wang; name: Nan Yang; name: Shaohan Huang; name: Li Dong; name: Furu Wei
Published: 2025-09-24 14:45:13

Abstract: This paper introduces a simple and scalable approach to improve the data
efficiency of large language model (LLM) training by augmenting existing text
data with thinking trajectories. The compute for pre-training LLMs has been
growing at an unprecedented rate, while the availability of high-quality data
remains limited. Consequently, maximizing the utility of available data
constitutes a significant research challenge. A primary impediment is that
certain high-quality tokens are difficult to learn given a fixed model
capacity, as the underlying rationale for a single token can be exceptionally
complex and deep. To address this issue, we propose Thinking augmented
Pre-Training (TPT), a universal methodology that augments text with
automatically generated thinking trajectories. Such augmentation effectively
increases the volume of the training data and makes high-quality tokens more
learnable through step-by-step reasoning and decomposition. We apply TPT across
diverse training configurations up to 100B tokens, encompassing pre-training
with both constrained and abundant data, as well as mid-training from strong
open-source checkpoints. Experimental results indicate that our method
substantially improves the performance of LLMs across various model sizes and
families. Notably, TPT enhances the data efficiency of LLM pre-training by a
factor of 3. For a 3B parameter model, it improves the post-training
performance by over 10% on several challenging reasoning benchmarks.