New paper finds a joint scaling law from pretraining through post-training
Pavel_Izmailov · x · 2026-07-21
New paper links pretraining and post-training with a unified scaling law
The paper, “Understanding Reasoning from Pretraining to Post-Training,” studies the full LLM training pipeline rather than treating pretraining and RL as separate stages.
Key claims from the post:
- the authors find a joint scaling law across pretraining and post-training
- they analyze how compute should be allocated across the pipeline
- they study what RL is doing to the policy
The attached figure summarizes three views:
- pretraining loss scaling over parameter counts
- RL reward scaling over RL steps
- a joint pretraining-RL frontier over total compute
Related event: New Research Proposes Joint Scaling Law for Pretraining and RL(18 posts)→
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