Understanding how and why data distillation methods work is vital not only for improving these methods but also for revealing fundamental characteristics of "good" training data.

The vast majority of time-series forecasting approaches require a substantial training dataset. However, many real-life forecasting applications have very little initial observations, sometimes just 40 or fewer. Thus, the applicability of most forecasting methods is restricted in data-sparse commercial applications.

Learning efficiently from small amounts of data has long been the focus of model-based reinforcement learning, both for the online case when interacting with the environment, and the offline case when learning from a fixed dataset. However, to date no single unified algorithm could demonstrate state-of-the-art results for both settings.In this work, we describe the Reanalyse algorithm, which uses model-based policy and value improvement operators to compute improved training targets for existing data points, allowing for efficient learning at data budgets varying by several orders of magnitude. We further show that Reanalyse can also be used to learn completely without environment interactions, as in the case of Offline Reinforcement Learning (Offline RL). Combining Reanalyse with the MuZero algorithm, we introduce MuZero Unplugged, a single unified algorithm for any data budget, including Offline RL. In contrast to previous work, our algorithm requires no special adaptations for the off-policy or Offline RL settings.

Understanding how and why data distillation methods work is vital not only for improving these methods but also for revealing fundamental characteristics of "good" training data.

Training data plays a crucial role in Large Language Models (LLM) scaling, yet high quality data is of limited supply. Synthetic data techniques offer a potential path toward sidestepping these limitations. We conduct a large-scale empirical investigation (>1000 LLMs with >100k GPU hours) using a unified protocol and scaling laws, comparing natural web data, diverse synthetic types (rephrased text, generated textbooks), and mixtures of natural and synthetic data. Specifically, we found pre-training on rephrased synthetic data \textit{alone} is not faster than pre-training on natural web texts; while pre-training on 1/3 rephrased synthetic data mixed with 2/3 natural web texts can speed up 5-10x (to reach the same validation loss) at larger data budgets. Pre-training on textbook-style synthetic data \textit{alone} results in notably higher loss on many downstream domains especially at small data budgets. "Good" ratios of synthetic data in training data mixtures depend on the model size and data budget, empirically converging to ~30% for rephrased synthetic data. Larger generator models do not necessarily yield better pre-training data than ~8B-param models. These results contribute mixed evidence on "model collapse" during large-scale single-round (n=1) model training on synthetic data--training on rephrased synthetic data shows no degradation in performance in foreseeable scales whereas training on mixtures of textbook-style pure-generated synthetic data shows patterns predicted by "model collapse". Our work demystifies synthetic data in pre-training, validates its conditional benefits, and offers practical guidance.

Optimizing data mixtures for supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of large language models (LLMs) is critical for developing general-purpose models, yet this area remains underexplored. In this paper, we frame data mixing as an optimization problem and introduce a novel method designed to minimize validation loss. Our approach parametrizes the loss by modeling effective data transferred and leveraging scaling laws for fine-tuning. By experimenting with various small-scale data mixtures, we fit these parameters and derive the optimal weights. We provide both mathematical proofs and empirical results demonstrating that our algorithm achieves excellent overall and individual performance across all domains. Through controlled experiments, we show that models trained with our optimized weights perform on par with those using optimal weights determined via grid search, with per-domain loss only 0.66% higher than the best domain loss from grid search on average. Additionally, we show that reweighting popular SFT datasets using our method improves both validation loss and downstream performance. Finally, we discuss how our method can generalize to guide data selection for domain-specific models and provide insights into SFT.

Figure 5: An ablation of ELLA's relevance classifier, where it is replaced with an oracle, in comparison

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in various generative tasks, but training them remains highly resource-intensive, often requiring millions of images and many days of GPU computation. From a data-centric perspective addressing this limitation, we study diffusion dataset condensation as a new and challenging problem setting. The goal is to construct a "synthetic" sub-dataset with significantly fewer samples than the original dataset, enabling high-quality diffusion model training with greatly reduced cost. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to formally investigate dataset condensation for diffusion models, whereas prior work focused on training discriminative models. To tackle this new challenge, we propose a novel Diffusion Dataset Condensation (D2C) framework, which consists of two phases: Select and Attach. The Select phase identifies a compact and diverse subset using a diffusion difficulty score and interval sampling. The Attach phase enhances the selected subset by attaching rich semantic and visual representations to strengthen the conditional signals. Extensive experiments across various dataset sizes, model architectures, and resolutions show that our D2C framework enables significantly faster diffusion model training with dramatically fewer data, while preserving high visual quality. Notably, for the SiT-XL/2 architecture, D2C achieves a 100x training speed-up, reaching a FID score of 4.3 in just 40k steps using only 0.8% of the training data.