Towards Effective and Efficient Continual Pre-training of Large Language Models
Paper · 2025 · Jie Chen, Zhipeng Chen, Jiapeng Wang et al.
Summary
Continual pre-training (CPT) is a common way to adapt an LLM to new languages or domains. Its main risk is catastrophic forgetting, where the model gains new skills but loses old ones. The authors give a fully open CPT recipe for Llama-3 (8B) that targets two weaknesses: Chinese language ability and multidisciplinary scientific reasoning.
Training runs in two phases:
- Bilingual adaptation: Chinese and English data are mixed, with sampling adjusted per topic and ordered by perplexity.
- Synthetic enhancement: LLM-generated scientific QA pairs, built from web pages, are added along with code data.
Topic-level performance is tracked during training so the data mixture can be rebalanced. To keep experiments affordable, design choices were first tested on TinyLlama and then applied to the 8B model.
The resulting model, Llama-3-SynE, uses only about 100B tokens. It clearly improves on Chinese and science benchmarks while largely keeping its English, math and code performance. This makes it a practical, budget-friendly template for adapting strong base models to new languages, which is relevant to Ukrainian NLP.
Key points
- Released resources: the Llama-3-SynE model, code and data (github.com/RUC-GSAI/Llama-3-SynE). The data comprises a 98.5B-token general corpus plus 1.5B tokens of synthetic science and code data.
- Gains over Llama-3 (8B):
- C-Eval: +8.81 (49.43 → 58.24)
- CMMLU: +6.31
- MATH: +12.00
- SciEval: +4.13
- GaoKao BIO: +25.71
- Forgetting is minor: MMLU dips slightly (66.60 → 65.19), while math and code results stay level or improve. The authors note that Chinese-adapted baselines typically lose more on English tasks.
- Data mixture: the Chinese-to-English ratio is set at 1:4. Topic labels come from TinyBERT (English) and BERT-Tiny-Chinese classifiers, trained on GPT-4 zero-shot annotations that align with MMLU/CMMLU subjects.
- Stated limitations: only one backbone and two target domains were tested, and no chat or aligned model was evaluated.
Fields, topics and concepts
📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 16,667 worksArtificial Intelligence · 16,194 worksArts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 works
🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Language models & pretraining · 3,320 works
Cite
Cite as Jie Chen, Zhipeng Chen, Jiapeng Wang, Kun Zhou, Yutao Zhu, Jinhao Jiang, Yingqian Min, Wayne Xin Zhao, Zhicheng Dou, Jiaxin Mao, Yankai Lin, Ruihua Song, Jun Xu, Xu Chen, Rui Yan, Zhewei Wei, Di Hu, Wenbing Huang and Ji-Rong Wen. 2025. Towards Effective and Efficient Continual Pre-training of Large Language Models. Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers).
@inproceedings{chen2025effective,
title = {{Towards Effective and Efficient Continual Pre-training of Large Language Models}},
author = {Jie Chen, Zhipeng Chen, Jiapeng Wang, Kun Zhou, Yutao Zhu, Jinhao Jiang, Yingqian Min, Wayne Xin Zhao, Zhicheng Dou, Jiaxin Mao, Yankai Lin, Ruihua Song, Jun Xu, Xu Chen, Rui Yan, Zhewei Wei, Di Hu, Wenbing Huang and Ji-Rong Wen},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)},
year = {2025},
doi = {10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.289},
url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.289}
}References
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