# SampleMix: A Sample-wise Pre-training Data Mixing Strategey by Coordinating Data Quality and Diversity

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.01506 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01506/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Think you have Solved Question Answering? Try ARC, the AI2 Reasoning Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05457/) (2018)
- [PIQA: Reasoning about Physical Commonsense in Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11641/) (2019)
- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [The Pile: An 800GB Dataset of Diverse Text for Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00027/) (2020)
- [Can a Suit of Armor Conduct Electricity? A New Dataset for Open Book Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02789/) (2018)
- [SuperGLUE: A Stickier Benchmark for General-Purpose Language Understanding Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00537/) (2019)
- [Qwen2.5-Coder Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12186/) (2024)
- [The LAMBADA dataset: Word prediction requiring a broad discourse context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06031/) (2016)
- [GLaM: Efficient Scaling of Language Models with Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06905/) (2021)
- [Textbooks Are All You Need II: phi-1.5 technical report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05463/) (2023)
- [CCNet: Extracting High Quality Monolingual Datasets from Web Crawl Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00359/) (2019)
- [Beyond neural scaling laws: beating power law scaling via data pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.14486/) (2022)
- [Documenting Large Webtext Corpora: A Case Study on the Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08758/) (2021)
- [Dolma: an Open Corpus of Three Trillion Tokens for Language Model Pretraining Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00159/) (2024)
- [DoReMi: Optimizing Data Mixtures Speeds Up Language Model Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10429/) (2023)
- [DeepSeek-Coder-V2: Breaking the Barrier of Closed-Source Models in Code Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11931/) (2024)
- [Data Selection for Language Models via Importance Resampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03169/) (2023)
- [SemDeDup: Data-efficient learning at web-scale through semantic deduplication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09540/) (2023)
- [mGTE: Generalized Long-Context Text Representation and Reranking Models for Multilingual Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19669/) (2024)
- [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)
- [D4: Improving LLM Pretraining via Document De-Duplication and Diversification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12284/) (2023)
- [How to Train Data-Efficient LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09668/) (2024)
- [DoGE: Domain Reweighting with Generalization Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15393/) (2023)
- [WanJuan: A Comprehensive Multimodal Dataset for Advancing English and Chinese Large Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10755/) (2023)
- [Effective pruning of web-scale datasets based on complexity of concept clusters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04578/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [LongCat-Flash Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.01322/) (2025)
- [Introducing LongCat-Flash-Thinking: A Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18883/) (2025)
- [Data Mixing Agent: Learning to Re-weight Domains for Continual Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15640/) (2025)
- [rPPG-VQA: A Video Quality Assessment Framework for Unsupervised rPPG Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11156/) (2026)
- [GEM: Geometric Entropy Mixing for Optimal LLM Data Curation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.26121/) (2026)
- [DRIFT: Data Selection for LLM Instruction Tuning via On-Policy Attribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.18307/) (2026)
- [emb-diversity: A Tool for Embedding-Based Measurement of Data Diversity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.19848/) (2026)
- [HERMES: A Multi-Granularity Labeling Substrate for Pre-training Data Mixtures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02266/) (2026)
- [CuraWeb: Joint Optimization of Quality, Redundancy, and Diversity for Web-Scale Pretraining Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.22662/) (2026)
- [Meddies-PII: A Multilingual Framework for Personally Identifiable Information Extraction in Clinical De-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.12544/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing pretraining data mixing methods for large language models (LLMs) typically follow a domain-wise methodology, a top-down process that first determines domain weights and then performs uniform data sampling across each domain. However, these approaches neglect significant inter-domain overlaps and commonalities, failing to control the global diversity of the constructed training dataset. Further, uniform sampling within domains ignores fine-grained sample-specific features, potentially leading to suboptimal data distribution. To address these shortcomings, we propose a novel sample-wise data mixture approach based on a bottom-up paradigm. This method performs global cross-domain sampling by systematically evaluating the quality and diversity of each sample, thereby dynamically determining the optimal domain distribution. Comprehensive experiments across multiple downstream tasks and perplexity assessments demonstrate that SampleMix surpasses existing domain-based methods. Meanwhile, SampleMix requires 1.4x to 2.1x training steps to achieves the baselines' performance, highlighting the substantial potential of SampleMix to optimize pre-training data.