R&B: Domain Regrouping and Data Mixture Balancing for Efficient
  Foundation Model Training
Authors: name: Albert Ge; name: Tzu-Heng Huang; name: John Cooper; name: Avi Trost; name: Ziyi Chu; name: Satya Sai Srinath Namburi GNVV; name: Ziyang Cai; name: Kendall Park; name: Nicholas Roberts; name: Frederic Sala
Published: 2025-05-01 07:08:19

Abstract: Data mixing strategies have successfully reduced the costs involved in
training language models. While promising, such methods suffer from two flaws.
First, they rely on predetermined data domains (e.g., data sources, task
types), which may fail to capture critical semantic nuances, leaving
performance on the table. Second, these methods scale with the number of
domains in a computationally prohibitive way. We address these challenges via
R&B, a framework that re-partitions training data based on semantic similarity
(Regroup) to create finer-grained domains, and efficiently optimizes the data
composition (Balance) by leveraging a Gram matrix induced by domain gradients
obtained throughout training. Unlike prior works, it removes the need for
additional compute to obtain evaluation information such as losses or
gradients. We analyze this technique under standard regularity conditions and
provide theoretical insights that justify R&B's effectiveness compared to
non-adaptive mixing approaches. Empirically, we demonstrate the effectiveness
of R&B on five diverse datasets ranging from natural language to reasoning and
multimodal tasks. With as little as 0.01% additional compute overhead, R&B
matches or exceeds the performance of state-of-the-art data mixing strategies.