Perplexity-Aware Data Scaling Law: Perplexity Landscapes Predict Performance for Continual Pre-training
Lei Liu Alibaba Group, Hao Zhu Ant Group, Xiaoyan Yang, Yue Shen antgroup, Zhixuan Chu Zhejiang University, Jian Wang, Jinjie Gu, Kui Ren Shanghai Institute for Advanced Study, Zhejiang University, The State Key Laboratory of Blockchain and Data Security, Zhejiang University and Zhejiang University
Continual Pre-training (CPT) serves as a fundamental approach for adapting foundation models to domain-specific applications. Scaling laws for pre-training define a power-law relationship between dataset size and the test loss of an LLM. However, the marginal gains from simply increasing data for CPT diminish rapidly, yielding suboptimal data utilization and inefficient training. To address this challenge, we propose a novel perplexity-aware data scaling law to establish a predictive relationship between the perplexity landscape of domain-specific data and the test loss. Our approach leverages the pre-trained model’s own perplexity on domain data as a proxy for estimating the knowledge gap, effectively quantifying the informational perplexity landscape of candidate training samples. By fitting this scaling law across diverse perplexity regimes, we enable adaptive selection of high-utility data subsets, prioritizing content that maximizes knowledge absorption while minimizing redundancy and noise. Extensive experiments on both medical and general-domain benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently identifies near-optimal training subsets, achieving superior performance with significantly reduced data consumption.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表