PRECOCIAL: Pretraining with Code Curriculums via Iterative Search for Accelerated Learning

Edward Gu, Ali Payani, Kevin Ellis

Fully synthetic pretraining data generated by symbolic programs can bootstrap downstream training on naturalistic tasks, such as language modeling, but the generating programs have so far been designed by hand. We introduce PRECOCIAL, a method for automatically optimizing programs that generate synthetic pretraining data. Starting from an initial generator program, an LLM iteratively rewrites the program, and each rewrite is scored by pretraining a randomly-initialized transformer on its data and fine-tuning it on the downstream task. Because every score requires training, PRECOCIAL keeps a single network for the entire search, continuing its pretraining for each accepted program instead of training a new network per candidate, making it significantly more efficient. On four language and code datasets, at a fixed fine-tuning budget, optimized programs reach lower perplexity than hand-designed curricula, published procedural generators, random program mutation and the program the LLM writes in the first iteration of the search, and reach the same perplexity as the hand-designed curricula with 9-33% fewer fine-tuning steps. PRECOCIAL also ends with lower perplexity than FunSearch…