# Unlocking Full Efficiency of Token Filtering in Large Language Model Training

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.00340 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.00340/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [Let's Verify Step by Step](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.20050/) (2023)
- [FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14135/) (2022)
- [QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14314/) (2023)
- [ZeRO: Memory Optimizations Toward Training Trillion Parameter Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02054/) (2019)
- [Math-Shepherd: Verify and Reinforce LLMs Step-by-step without Human Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08935/) (2023)
- [Are NLP Models really able to Solve Simple Math Word Problems?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07191/) (2021)
- [MetaMath: Bootstrap Your Own Mathematical Questions for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12284/) (2023)
- [TensorFlow: Large-Scale Machine Learning on Heterogeneous Distributed Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.04467/) (2016)
- [MathQA: Towards Interpretable Math Word Problem Solving with Operation-Based Formalisms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13319/) (2019)
- [Efficient Large-Scale Language Model Training on GPU Clusters Using Megatron-LM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04473/) (2021)
- [CCNet: Extracting High Quality Monolingual Datasets from Web Crawl Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00359/) (2019)
- [MAmmoTH: Building Math Generalist Models through Hybrid Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05653/) (2023)
- [Compacter: Efficient Low-Rank Hypercomplex Adapter Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04647/) (2021)
- [DeepSpeed-MoE: Advancing Mixture-of-Experts Inference and Training to Power Next-Generation AI Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05596/) (2022)
- [DoReMi: Optimizing Data Mixtures Speeds Up Language Model Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10429/) (2023)
- [Dynamic Prompt Learning via Policy Gradient for Semi-structured Mathematical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14610/) (2022)
- [A Diverse Corpus for Evaluating and Developing English Math Word Problem Solvers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15772/) (2021)
- [Reducing Activation Recomputation in Large Transformer Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05198/) (2022)
- [DyLoRA: Parameter Efficient Tuning of Pre-trained Models using Dynamic Search-Free Low-Rank Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07558/) (2022)
- [Data Mixing Laws: Optimizing Data Mixtures by Predicting Language Modeling Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16952/) (2024)
- [RegMix: Data Mixture as Regression for Language Model Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01492/) (2024)
- [QuRating: Selecting High-Quality Data for Training Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09739/) (2024)
- [OpenWebMath: An Open Dataset of High-Quality Mathematical Web Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06786/) (2023)
- [Orca-Math: Unlocking the potential of SLMs in Grade School Math](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14830/) (2024)
- [DoGE: Domain Reweighting with Generalization Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15393/) (2023)
- [Improving Pretraining Data Using Perplexity Correlations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05816/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Reinforcement Learning-Guided Chain-of-Draft for Token-Efficient Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25243/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Token filtering has been proposed to enhance the utility of large language models (LLMs) by eliminating inconsequential tokens during training. While usingfewer tokens is expected to reduce computational workloads, existing methods have not yet achieved a real-world efficiency boost. This is primarily due to two factors: (1) existing work has inadequate sparsity for speedup, and (2) token filtering operates within a sparsity range that is non-standard in existing machine learning (ML) libraries and thus cannot be efficiently supported. This paper presents Centrifuge, a system that leverages algorithm and system co-design to unleash the full efficiency of token filtering in LLM training. At the algorithm level, Centrifuge filters activations of inconsequential tokens in the attention backward kernel to amplify the sparsity in backward computation. At the system level, Centrifuge proposes an automatic workflow that transforms sparse GEMM into dimension-reduced dense GEMM for optimized efficiency using standard ML libraries. Evaluations on models with various scales--from 1.1B to 40B--demonstrate that Centrifuge reduces backpropagation time by up to 49.9% and end-to-end training time by up to 34.7% when filtering 50% of tokens. Utility assessments indicate that Centrifuge preserves the utility benefits of token filtering and significantly enhances model performance by up to 26.6% compared to standard training. Centrifuge is designed for seamless integration into existing LLM training frameworks, enabling systems already utilizing token filtering to accelerate training with just one line of code.