mala
DCAD-2000: AMultilingual Dataset across 2000+ Languages with Data Cleaning as Anomaly Detection
The rapid development of multilingual large language models (LLMs) highlights the need for high-quality, diverse, and well-curated multilingual datasets. In this paper, we introduce DCAD-2000 (Data Cleaning as Anomaly Detection), a largescale multilingual corpus constructed from newly extracted Common Crawl data and existing multilingual sources. DCAD-2000 covers 2,282 languages, 46.72TB of text, and 8.63 billion documents, spanning 155 high-and medium-resource languages and 159 writing scripts. To overcome the limitations of existing data cleaning approaches, which rely on manually designed heuristic thresholds, we reframe data cleaning as an anomaly detection problem. This dynamic filtering paradigm substantially improves data quality by automatically identifying and removing noisy or anomalous content. By fine-tuning LLMs on DCAD-2000, we demonstrate notable improvements in data quality, robustness of the cleaning pipeline, and downstream performance, particularly for low-resource languages across multiple multilingual benchmarks.
Parallelizing MCMCAcross the Sequence Length
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are foundational algorithms for Bayesian inference and probabilistic modeling. However, most MCMC algorithms are inherently sequential and their time complexity scales linearly with the sequence length. Previous work on adapting MCMC to modern hardware has therefore focused on running many independent chains in parallel. Here, we take an alternative approach: we propose algorithms to evaluate MCMC samplers in parallel across the chain length. To do this, we build on recent methods for parallel evaluation of nonlinear recursions that formulate the state sequence as a solution to a fixed-point problem and solve for the fixed-point using a parallel form of Newton's method. We show how this approach can be used to parallelize Gibbs, Metropolis-adjusted Langevin, and Hamiltonian Monte Carlo sampling across the sequence length. In several examples, we demonstrate the simulation of up to hundreds of thousands of MCMC samples with only tens of parallel Newton iterations. Additionally, we develop two new parallel quasi-Newton methods to evaluate nonlinear recursions with lower memory costs and reduced runtime. We find that the proposed parallel algorithms accelerate MCMC sampling across multiple examples, in some cases by more than an order of magnitude compared to sequential evaluation.
tBayes-MICE: A Bayesian Approach to Multiple Imputation for Time Series Data
Ibenegbu, Amuche, de Micheaux, Pierre Lafaye, Chandra, Rohitash
Time-series analysis is often affected by missing data, a common problem across several fields, including healthcare and environmental monitoring. Multiple Imputation by Chained Equations (MICE) has been prominent for imputing missing values through "fully conditional specification". We extend MICE using the Bayesian framework (tBayes-MICE), utilising Bayesian inference to impute missing values via Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling to account for uncertainty in MICE model parameters and imputed values. We also include temporally informed initialisation and time-lagged features in the model to respect the sequential nature of time-series data. We evaluate the tBayes-MICE method using two real-world datasets (AirQuality and PhysioNet), and using both the Random Walk Metropolis (RWM) and the Metropolis-Adjusted Langevin Algorithm (MALA) samplers. Our results demonstrate that tBayes-MICE reduces imputation errors relative to the baseline methods over all variables and accounts for uncertainty in the imputation process, thereby providing a more accurate measure of imputation error. We also found that MALA mixed better than RWM across most variables, achieving comparable accuracy while providing more consistent posterior exploration. Overall, these findings suggest that the tBayes-MICE framework represents a practical and efficient approach to time-series imputation, balancing increased accuracy with meaningful quantification of uncertainty in various environmental and clinical settings.