NVIDIA Unveils Nemotron-CC: A Trillion-Token Dataset for Enhanced LLM Training

NVIDIA has integrated its Nemotron-CC pipeline into the NeMo Curator, offering a groundbreaking approach to curating high-quality datasets for large language models (LLMs). The Nemotron-CC dataset leverages a 6.3-trillion-token English language collection from Common Crawl, aiming to enhance the accuracy of LLMs significantly, according to NVIDIA.

Advancements in Data Curation

The Nemotron-CC pipeline addresses the limitations of traditional data curation methods, which often discard potentially useful data due to heuristic filtering. By employing classifier ensembling and synthetic data rephrasing, the pipeline generates 2 trillion tokens of high-quality synthetic data, recovering up to 90% of content lost by filtering.

Innovative Pipeline Features

The pipeline’s data curation process begins with HTML-to-text extraction using tools like jusText and FastText for language identification. It then applies deduplication to remove redundant data, utilizing NVIDIA RAPIDS libraries for efficient processing. The process includes 28 heuristic filters to ensure data quality and a PerplexityFilter module for further refinement.

Quality labeling is achieved through an ensemble of classifiers that assess and categorize documents into quality levels, facilitating targeted synthetic data generation. This approach enables the creation of diverse QA pairs, distilled content, and organized knowledge lists from the text.

Impact on LLM Training

Training LLMs with the Nemotron-CC dataset yields significant improvements. For instance, a Llama 3.1 model trained on a 1 trillion-token subset of Nemotron-CC achieved a 5.6-point increase in the MMLU score compared to models trained on traditional datasets. Furthermore, models trained on long horizon tokens, including Nemotron-CC, saw a 5-point boost in benchmark scores.

Getting Started with Nemotron-CC

The Nemotron-CC pipeline is available for developers aiming to pretrain foundation models or perform domain-adaptive pretraining across various fields. NVIDIA provides a step-by-step tutorial and APIs for customization, enabling users to optimize the pipeline for specific needs. The integration into NeMo Curator allows for seamless development of both pretraining and fine-tuning datasets.

For more information, visit the NVIDIA blog.

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