DataComp-LM: In search of the next generation of training sets for language models

Jeffrey Li, Alex Fang, G. Smyrnis, Maor Ivgi, Matt Jordan +54 more
2/3/2026

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Abstract

We introduce DataComp for Language Models (DCLM), a testbed for controlled dataset experiments with the goal of improving language models. As part of DCLM, we provide a standardized corpus of 240T tokens extracted from Common Crawl, effective pretraining recipes based on the OpenLM framework, and a broad suite of 53 downstream evaluations. Participants in the DCLM benchmark can experiment with data curation strategies such as deduplication, filtering, and data mixing at model scales ranging from 412M to 7B parameters. As a baseline for DCLM, we conduct extensive experiments and find that model-based filtering is key to assembling a high-quality training set. The resulting dataset, DCLM-Baseline enables training a 7B parameter language model from scratch to 64% 5-shot accuracy on MMLU with 2.6T training tokens. Compared to MAP-Neo, the previous state-of-the-art in open-data language models, DCLM-Baseline represents a 6.6 percentage point improvement on MMLU while being trained with 40% less compute. Our baseline model is also comparable to Mistral-7B-v0.3 and Llama 3 8B on MMLU (63%&66%), and performs similarly on an average of 53 natural language understanding tasks while being trained with 6.6x less compute than Llama 3 8B. Our results highlight the importance of dataset design for training language models and offer a starting point for further research on data curation.

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Cite this paper

@article{li2026datacomplm,
  title  = {DataComp-LM: In search of the next generation of training sets for language models},
  author = {Jeffrey Li and Alex Fang and G. Smyrnis and Maor Ivgi and Matt Jordan and S. Gadre and Hritik Bansal and E. Guha and Sedrick Scott Keh and Kushal Arora and Saurabh Garg and Rui Xin and Niklas Muennighoff and Reinhard Heckel and Jean-Pierre Mercat and Mayee Chen and Suchin Gururangan and Mitchell Wortsman and Alon Albalak and Yonatan Bitton and Marianna Nezhurina and Amro Abbas and Cheng-Yu Hsieh and Dhruba Ghosh and Josh Gardner and Maciej Kilian and Hanlin Zhang and Rulin Shao and Sarah Pratt and Sunny Sanyal and Gabriel Ilharco and G. Daras and Kalyani Marathe and Aaron Gokaslan and Jieyu Zhang and K. Chandu and Thao Nguyen and Igor Vasiljevic and S. Kakade and Shuran Song and Sujay Sanghavi and Fartash Faghri and Sewoong Oh and Luke S. Zettlemoyer and Kyle Lo and Alaaeldin El-Nouby and Hadi Pouransari and Alexander Toshev and Stephanie Wang and Dirk Groeneveld and Luca Soldani and Pang Wei Koh and J. Jitsev and Thomas Kollar and Alexandros G. Dimakis and Y. Carmon and Achal Dave and Ludwig Schmidt and Vaishaal Shankar},
  year   = {2026},
  eprint = {2406.11794},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  doi    = {10.48550/arXiv.2406.11794},
  url    = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.11794},
  journal = {NEURIPS 2024 2024}
}

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