DeepSeek used SmolVLM to quality-filter interleaved pretraining data, researcher spots

eliebakouch · x · 2026-09-10

Hugging Face researcher Elie Bakouch spotted in DeepSeek's tech report that the company employed SmolVLM to run strict quality scoring on image-text content to extract high-quality interleaved pretraining data — a level of pretraining data care he says he hasn't seen in other models.

Related event: DeepSeek Found Using SmolVLM to Curate Pretraining Image-Text Data(3 posts)→

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