arXiv:2610.37631 · v1

What Improves During Pretraining? Tracking Knowledge Acquisition with Point-in-Time Models

首次提交 2026-10-28 01:52

版本更新 2026-10-28 01:52

雷达观测 2026-10-29 00:34

摘要

Language models pretrained on web corpora collected over multiple years learn both general and domain-specific knowledge. How these different kinds of knowledge are learned as pretraining progresses remains unclear. Recent point-in-time models trained on web snapshots from different years provide a way to probe how knowledge prevalence varies over time. Using these models, we propose a temporal variability score (TVS), defined as the coefficient of variation of an item's negative log-likelihood across models. A higher score suggests that the knowledge may be less consistently represented across years of web text. We evaluate six benchmarks covering diverse topics using six models from multiple open-source model families. We find that low- and high-TVS items are learned similarly early in training, but high-TVS items improve faster later on. At the end of the pretraining run, high-TVS items outperform low-TVS items in 34 of 36 model-benchmark settings, with an average advantage of 7.3 points of chance-normalized accuracy. This pattern is most robust on knowledge-intensive tasks, even when comparing items of similar difficulty. Our findings reveal differences in how knowledge is learned over the course of pretraining, with temporal variability providing a diagnostic of these learning dynamics beyond aggregate benchmark scores.

作者备注：Accepted to AACL 2026. This version corrects minor errors in the appendix