理解数据时间性对大语言模型预训练的影响
阅读原文· arxiv.org研究比较了按时间顺序排列数据与传统打乱数据两种预训练方式,针对一个在6B参数模型上训练的实验。研究引入了包含超过7000个时间锚定问题的新基准。结果发现,时间有序预训练的模型在通用语言能力上与打乱预训练基线持平,但其知识更及时、时间定位更准确;打乱预训练则在旧数据上表现达到峰值。代码、模型检查点和数据集已开源。
Large language models (LLMs) are typically trained on shuffled corpora, yielding models whose knowledge is frozen at train time and whose temporal grounding remains poorly understood. In this work, we study the impact of pre-training dynamics on the acquisition of time-sensitive factual knowledge, focusing specifically on data ordering. Our main contributions are twofold. First, we introduce a comprehensive benchmark of over 7,000 temporally grounded questions and an evaluation protocol that enables analysis of whether models correctly associate facts with their corresponding time periods. Second, we pretrain 6B-parameter models on temporally ordered Common Crawl snapshots and compare them against standard shuffled pre-training. Our results show that sequentially trained models match shuffled baselines on general language understanding and common knowledge while consistently exhibiting more up-to-date and temporally precise knowledge. Temporally ordered pre-training yields improved factual freshness, while shuffled pre-training peaks on older data, possibly due to increased factual repetition. These findings, along with the release of our code at https://github.com/kyutai-labs/kairos , checkpoints, and datasets at https://huggingface.co/collections/kyutai/kairos provide a foundation for future research on continual learning for LLMs.