ScalingFilter: Assessing Data Quality through Inverse Utilization of Scaling Laws

High-quality data is crucial for the pre-training performance of large language models. Unfortunately, existing quality filtering methods rely on a known high-quality dataset as reference, which can introduce potential bias and compromise diversity. In this paper, we propose ScalingFilter, a novel approach that evaluates text quality based on the perplexity difference between two language models trained on the same data, thereby eliminating the influence of the reference dataset in the filtering process. An theoretical analysis shows that ScalingFilter is equivalent to an inverse utilization of scaling laws. Through training models with 1.3B parameters on the same data source processed by various quality filters, we find ScalingFilter can improve zero-shot performance of pre-trained models in downstream tasks. To assess the bias introduced by quality filtering, we introduce semantic diversity, a metric of utilizing text embedding models for semantic representations. Extensive experiments reveal that semantic diversity is a reliable indicator of dataset diversity, and ScalingFilter achieves an optimal balance between downstream performance and semantic diversity.

RoBus: A Multimodal Dataset for Controllable Road Networks and Building Layouts Generation

Automated 3D city generation, focusing on road networks and building layouts, is in high demand for applications in urban design, multimedia games and autonomous driving simulations. The surge of generative AI facilitates designing city layouts based on deep learning models. However, the lack of high-quality datasets and benchmarks hinders the progress of these data-driven methods in generating road networks and building layouts. Furthermore, few studies consider urban characteristics, which generally take graphics as analysis objects and are crucial for practical applications, to control the generative process. To alleviate these problems, we introduce a multimodal dataset with accompanying evaluation metrics for controllable generation of Road networks and Building layouts (RoBus), which is the first and largest open-source dataset in city generation so far. RoBus dataset is formatted as images, graphics and texts, with $72,400$ paired samples that cover around $80,000km^2$ globally. We analyze the RoBus dataset statistically and validate the effectiveness against existing road networks and building layouts generation methods. Additionally, we design new baselines that incorporate urban characteristics, such as road orientation and building density, in the process of generating road networks and building layouts using the RoBus dataset, enhancing the practicality of automated urban design. The RoBus dataset and related codes are published at https://github.com/tourlics/RoBus_Dataset.

FP8-LM: Training FP8 Large Language Models

In this paper, we explore FP8 low-bit data formats for efficient training of large language models (LLMs). Our key insight is that most variables, such as gradients and optimizer states, in LLM training can employ low-precision data formats without compromising model accuracy and requiring no changes to hyper-parameters. Specifically, we propose a new FP8 automatic mixed-precision framework for training LLMs. This framework offers three levels of FP8 utilization to streamline mixed-precision and distributed parallel training for LLMs. It gradually incorporates 8-bit gradients, optimizer states, and distributed learning in an incremental manner. Experiment results show that, during the training of GPT-175B model on H100 GPU platform, our FP8 mixed-precision training framework not only achieved a remarkable 42% reduction in real memory usage but also ran 64% faster than the widely adopted BF16 framework (i.e., Megatron-LM), surpassing the speed of Nvidia Transformer Engine by 17%. This largely reduces the training costs for large foundation models. Furthermore, our FP8 mixed-precision training methodology is generic. It can be seamlessly applied to other tasks such as LLM instruction tuning and reinforcement learning with human feedback, offering savings in fine-tuning expenses. Our FP8 low-precision training framework is open-sourced at {https://github.com/Azure/MS-AMP}{aka.ms/MS.AMP}.