Tag: Pretraining

All the articles with the tag "Pretraining".

• How to Test Pretraining Ideas at Small Scale Before Betting on a Large Model

  29 Jun, 2026 · 25 min read

  A practical guide to validating pretraining improvements with small proxy models, scaling ladders, isoFLOP budgets, loss curves, downstream evals, and rank-correlation checks before committing to an expensive large-model run.

• Why Embeddings Cannot Solve Eval-Set Contamination

  29 Jun, 2026 · 11 min read

  A technical deep dive on why semantic embedding search is useful but insufficient for eval-set decontamination: leakage is about evaluation advantage, not just text similarity.

• Pretraining Contamination: Why Don't Train on the Test Set Became Hard

  29 Jun, 2026 · 14 min read

  A practical introduction to LLM pretraining contamination: why benchmark leakage is not ordinary deduplication, how public evals leak into web-scale corpora, and how layered decontamination pipelines reduce risk.