SlimPajama-DC: Understanding Data Combinations for LLM Training
Authors: name: Zhiqiang Shen; name: Tianhua Tao; name: Liqun Ma; name: Willie Neiswanger; name: Joel Hestness; name: Natalia Vassilieva; name: Daria Soboleva; name: Eric Xing
Published: 2023-09-19 17:59:54

Abstract: This paper aims to understand the impacts of various data combinations (e.g.,
web text, wikipedia, github, books) on the training of large language models
using SlimPajama. SlimPajama is a rigorously deduplicated, multi-source
dataset, which has been refined and further deduplicated to 627B tokens from
the extensive 1.2T tokens RedPajama dataset contributed by Together. We've
termed our research as SlimPajama-DC, an empirical analysis designed to uncover
fundamental characteristics and best practices associated with employing
SlimPajama in the training of large language models. During our research with
SlimPajama, two pivotal observations emerged: (1) Global deduplication vs.
local deduplication. We analyze and discuss how global (across different
sources of datasets) and local (within the single source of dataset)
deduplications affect the performance of trained models. (2) Proportions of
high-quality/highly-deduplicated multi-source datasets in the combination. To
study this, we construct six configurations of SlimPajama dataset and train
individual ones using 1.3B Cerebras-GPT model with Alibi and SwiGLU. Our best
configuration outperforms the 1.3B model trained on RedPajama using the same
number of training tokens by a significant margin. All our 1.3B models are
trained on Cerebras 16times CS-2 cluster with a total of 80 PFLOP/s in bf16
mixed precision. We further extend our discoveries (such as increasing data
diversity is crucial after global deduplication) on a 7B model with large
batch-size training. Our models and the separate SlimPajama-DC datasets are
available at: https://huggingface.co/MBZUAI-LLM and
https://huggingface.co/datasets/cerebras/SlimPajama-627B.