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Scaling Pedagogical Pre-training to 10 Billion Tokens
New blog post exploring what happens when you take optimal data mixing insights and scale up the data generation itself.
We built Sutra, a multi-stage framework for generating pedagogical pre-training data guided by a knowledge graph of ~2,000 concepts across 9 domains. The pipeline includes structured content generation, six-dimension quality evaluation, diversity management across 20 content styles, and a cleaning stage to prevent collapse.
The result is codelion/sutra-10B, a 10.2 billion token pedagogical dataset with rich metadata (domain, complexity, prerequisites, quality scores) on every entry.
We trained codelion/SmolLM2-70M on it for 3 full epochs (30.6B tokens) on a single A10 GPU in ~78 hours.
Key finding: perplexity kept improving across epochs, but benchmark gains plateaued fast. At 70M parameters, the model hits a representational ceiling that more data alone can't break through.
Full writeup with comparisons against 7 other datasets, detailed benchmark breakdowns, and connections to recent work on synthetic data scaling, curriculum learning, and data mixing laws: https://huggingface.co/blog/codelion/scaling-pedagogical-pretraining-10-billion-tokens
All datasets at multiple scales (10M, 100M, 1B, 10B) plus seed concepts and an SFT variant are in the Sutra Pedagogical Datasets collection.
New blog post exploring what happens when you take optimal data mixing insights and scale up the data generation itself.
We built Sutra, a multi-stage framework for generating pedagogical pre-training data guided by a knowledge graph of ~2,000 concepts across 9 domains. The pipeline includes structured content generation, six-dimension quality evaluation, diversity management across 20 content styles, and a cleaning stage to prevent collapse.
The result is codelion/sutra-10B, a 10.2 billion token pedagogical dataset with rich metadata (domain, complexity, prerequisites, quality scores) on every entry.
We trained codelion/SmolLM2-70M on it for 3 full epochs (30.6B tokens) on a single A10 GPU in ~78 hours.
Key finding: perplexity kept improving across epochs, but benchmark gains plateaued fast. At 70M parameters, the model hits a representational ceiling that more data alone can't break through.
Full writeup with comparisons against 7 other datasets, detailed benchmark breakdowns, and connections to recent work on synthetic data scaling, curriculum learning, and data mixing laws: https://huggingface.co/blog/codelion/scaling-pedagogical-pretraining-10-billion-tokens
All datasets at multiple scales (10M, 100M, 1B, 10B) plus seed concepts and an SFT variant are in the Sutra Pedagogical Datasets collection.
