Synergistic Effects in Pretraining Data Domains

giannis_daras · x · 2026-07-17

This thread explores a research question: Can we determine whether different data domains during pretraining act "synergistically" or "competitively"?

The author observes that adding code data to training improves model performance on math tasks, though certain data combinations can actually harm each other. Researchers term this phenomenon data synergy and are attempting to incorporate it into scaling laws to estimate the effects of different data mixtures.

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