How to Synthesize Text Data without Model Collapse?
Model collapse in synthetic data indicates that iterative training on
self-generated data leads to a gradual decline in performance. With the
proliferation of AI models, synthetic data will fundamentally reshape the web
data ecosystem. Future GPT-{n} models will inevitably be trained on a blend
of synthetic and human-produced data. In this paper, we focus on two questions:
what is the impact of synthetic data on language model training, and how to
synthesize data without model collapse? We first pre-train language models
across different proportions of synthetic data, revealing a negative
correlation between the proportion of synthetic data and model performance. We
further conduct statistical analysis on synthetic data to uncover
distributional shift phenomenon and over-concentration of n-gram features.
Inspired by the above findings, we propose token editing on human-produced data
to obtain semi-synthetic data. As a proof of concept, we theoretically
demonstrate that token-level editing can prevent model collapse, as the test
error is constrained by a finite upper bound. We conduct extensive experiments
on pre-training from scratch, continual pre-training, and supervised
fine-tuning. The results validate our theoretical proof that token-level
editing improves data quality and enhances model performance.
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Hengli Li
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Messi Hua
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Xingtai Lv
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Bowen Zhou
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BowenZhou
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How to Synthesize Text Data without Model Collapse?
Model collapse in synthetic data indicates that iterative training on
self-generated data leads to a gradual decline in performance. With the
proliferation of AI models, synthetic data will fundamentally reshape the web
data ecosystem. Future GPT-{n} models will inevitably be trained on a blend
of synthetic and human-produced data. In this paper, we focus on two questions:
what is the impact of synthetic data on language model training, and how to
synthesize data without model collapse? We first pre-train language models
across different proportions of synthetic data, revealing a negative
correlation between the proportion of synthetic data and model performance. We
further conduct statistical analysis on synthetic data to uncover
distributional shift phenomenon and over-concentration of n-gram features.
Inspired by the above findings, we propose token editing on human-produced data
to obtain semi-synthetic data. As a proof of concept, we theoretically
demonstrate that token-level editing can prevent model collapse, as the test
error is constrained by a finite upper bound. We conduct extensive experiments
on pre-training from scratch, continual pre-training, and supervised
fine-tuning. The results validate our theoretical proof that token-level
editing improves data quality and enhances model performance.
The use of synthetic data in language model training leads to model collapse, which is mitigated by token-level editing of human-produced data to create semi-synthetic data.
synthetic data model collapse language model training distributional shift n-gram features token editing semi-synthetic data pre-training continual pre-training supervised fine-tuning