Challenge: Scaling laws in language modeling quantify training loss as a function of dataset size and model parameters, but neglect the critical role of data quality in model generalization.
Approach: They propose to use effective training tokens as a combination of text diversity and syntheticity as measured by a teacher model to calculate scaling laws.
Outcome: The proposed term effective training tokens is a combination of two readily-computed indicators of text diversity and syntheticity as measured by a teacher model.

Similar Papers

Revisiting Scaling Laws for Language Models: The Role of Data Quality and Training Strategies (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing scaling laws suggest augmenting model size and training data results in enhanced performance, but recent studies reveal deviations, particularly in large language models, where performance improvements decelerate—a phenomenon known as sub-scaling.
Approach: They propose a sub-optimal scaling law that better predicts performance in sub-scaling regimes by examining data quality and training strategies.
Outcome: The proposed scaling law better predicts performance in sub-scaling regimes, highlighting the importance of data quality and diversity.
Not-Just-Scaling Laws: Towards a Better Understanding of the Downstream Impact of Language Model Design Decisions (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Language model performance is largely dependent on pretraining decisions, but scaling laws based on only these two aspects do not always explain downstream task performance.
Approach: They meta-analyze 92 open-source pretrained models to quantify their impact on performance.
Outcome: The framework lays a foundation for more systematic investigation of how model development choices shape final capabilities.
Scaling Laws for Multilingual Language Models (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing scaling laws for language models are limited to a limited number of languages, but they can be applied to arbitrary number of different languages.
Approach: They propose a scaling law for general-purpose decoder-only language models trained on multilingual data that shifts focus from individual languages to language families.
Outcome: The proposed scaling law can be applied to models trained on multilingual data . it can be used to predict performance across multiple languages and models .
Scaling Laws for Code: Every Programming Language Matters (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing studies focus on language-agnostic settings, neglecting the inherently multilingual nature of modern software development.
Approach: They propose a proportion-dependent scaling law that prioritizes high-utility languages . they propose PLs to have varying effects during pre-training that affect model performance .
Outcome: The proposed scaling law is based on 1000+ experiments across multiple languages and models.
Data and Parameter Scaling Laws for Neural Machine Translation (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent work shows that supervised neural machine translation models scale like a power law with the amount of training data and number of non-embedding parameters in the model.
Approach: They show that cross-entropy loss of supervised neural machine translation models scales like a power law with the amount of training data and number of non-embedding parameters in the model.
Outcome: The proposed model can predict BLEU and ROI of labeling data in low-resource language pairs.
Scaling Laws Under the Microscope: Predicting Transformer Performance from Small Scale Experiments (2022.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Neural scaling laws define a predictable relationship between a model’s parameter count and its performance after training in the form of a power law.
Approach: They perform an empirical investigation of language understanding tasks and evaluate their results to determine whether scaling laws can be used to accelerate model development.
Outcome: The proposed scaling laws can be exploited for debugging convergence when training large models, and can predict the performance of larger models.
Demystifying Synthetic Data in LLM Pre-training: A Systematic Study of Scaling Laws, Benefits, and Pitfalls (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: a large-scale empirical study compares natural web data, diverse synthetic types, and mixtures of natural and synthetic data.
Approach: They conduct a large-scale empirical study on large-volume LLMs using a unified protocol and scaling laws.
Outcome: The proposed method is faster than pre-training on natural web data, the authors show . their results are consistent with previous studies on rephrased text and textbooks .
Scaling Data-Constrained Language Models with Synthetic Data (2026.findings-eacl)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) improve with more training data, but practical limitations on data collection constrain further scaling.
Approach: They compare three strategies to generate Japanese text, repeat the limited Japanese Web text, and use English Web text to fill the data shortfall.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms baselines and achieves the performance achieved when the entire token budget is filled with additional organic Japanese Web text.
ScalingFilter: Assessing Data Quality through Inverse Utilization of Scaling Laws (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing quality filtering methods rely on a high-quality dataset as reference . Existing methods introduce potential biases and compromise diversity .
Approach: They propose a method that evaluates text quality based on the perplexity difference between two language models trained on the same data.
Outcome: The proposed approach improves performance of pre-trained models without increasing training costs.
A Survey of Post-Training Scaling in Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated proficiency in understanding and generating human natural languages.
Approach: They propose a framework for scaling large language models using supervised fine-tuning, RLxF and test-time compute methodologies.
Outcome: The proposed model can be used to understand and generate human natural languages.

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