# Oasis: Data Curation and Assessment System for Pretraining of Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.12537 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12537/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [The Pile: An 800GB Dataset of Diverse Text for Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00027/) (2020)
- [Pythia: A Suite for Analyzing Large Language Models Across Training and Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01373/) (2023)
- [Scaling Language Models: Methods, Analysis & Insights from Training Gopher](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11446/) (2021)
- [PaLM 2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10403/) (2023)
- [GLaM: Efficient Scaling of Language Models with Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06905/) (2021)
- [The RefinedWeb Dataset for Falcon LLM: Outperforming Curated Corpora with Web Data, and Web Data Only](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01116/) (2023)
- [Deduplicating Training Data Makes Language Models Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06499/) (2021)
- [Textbooks Are All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11644/) (2023)
- [CCNet: Extracting High Quality Monolingual Datasets from Web Crawl Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00359/) (2019)
- [Documenting Large Webtext Corpora: A Case Study on the Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08758/) (2021)
- [ERNIE 3.0: Large-scale Knowledge Enhanced Pre-training for Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02137/) (2021)
- [Quality at a Glance: An Audit of Web-Crawled Multilingual Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12028/) (2021)
- [A Pretrainer's Guide to Training Data: Measuring the Effects of Data Age, Domain Coverage, Quality, & Toxicity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13169/) (2023)
- [Challenges in Detoxifying Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07445/) (2021)
- [The BigScience ROOTS Corpus: A 1.6TB Composite Multilingual Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03915/) (2023)
- [Towards a Cleaner Document-Oriented Multilingual Crawled Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.06642/) (2022)
- [PolyLM: An Open Source Polyglot Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06018/) (2023)
- [BigBIO: A Framework for Data-Centric Biomedical Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.15076/) (2022)
- [Yuan 1.0: Large-Scale Pre-trained Language Model in Zero-Shot and Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04725/) (2021)
- [EVA2.0: Investigating Open-Domain Chinese Dialogue Systems with Large-Scale Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09313/) (2022)
- [The ROOTS Search Tool: Data Transparency for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14035/) (2023)
- [Data Portraits: Recording Foundation Model Training Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03919/) (2023)
- [Perplexed by Quality: A Perplexity-based Method for Adult and Harmful Content Detection in Multilingual Heterogeneous Web Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10440/) (2022)
- [GAIA Search: Hugging Face and Pyserini Interoperability for NLP Training Data Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01481/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [On Catastrophic Inheritance of Large Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01909/) (2024)
- [DCA-Bench: A Benchmark for Dataset Curation Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07275/) (2024)
- [What's New in My Data? Novelty Exploration via Contrastive Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14765/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Data is one of the most critical elements in building a large language model. However, existing systems either fail to customize a corpus curation pipeline or neglect to leverage comprehensive corpus assessment for iterative optimization of the curation. To this end, we present a pretraining corpus curation and assessment platform called Oasis -- a one-stop system for data quality improvement and quantification with user-friendly interactive interfaces. Specifically, the interactive modular rule filter module can devise customized rules according to explicit feedback. The debiased neural filter module builds the quality classification dataset in a negative-centric manner to remove the undesired bias. The adaptive document deduplication module could execute large-scale deduplication with limited memory resources. These three parts constitute the customized data curation module. And in the holistic data assessment module, a corpus can be assessed in local and global views, with three evaluation means including human, GPT-4, and heuristic metrics. We exhibit a complete process to use Oasis for the curation and assessment of pretraining data. In addition, an 800GB bilingual corpus curated by Oasis is publicly released.
