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nano-gpt-data-curation

claude-opus-5

nano-gpt-data-curation — graded by the task's verifier against a measured baseline.

backend
modal
variant
claude claude-opus-5
metric
held-out multi-domain perplexity
actions
29
duration
46m
recorded
2026-08-04

run iddclm-nano-curation__SREjBg2

Score

reward
345.290
compare against every run on this task →

Summary

Done. All three deliverables are in place and verified.

Result: dev perplexity 381–384 vs 470 random baseline (−19%).

What worked, in order of effect size:

selection (12M tokens, frozen trainer)dev PPL
random pool (baseline)469.9
junk gate only, random order417.4
gate + hard top-k by quality classifier463.5
gate + gentle tilt 0.5 (submitted)381.1

The main finding is that the quality classifier (fastText-style hashed uni/bigrams, dev-target vs random-pool, held-out AUC 0.949) is a good prior but a terrible filter. Perplexity vs tilt strength is U-shaped with an interior optimum near 0.5 — hard top-k is worse than doing nothing, because the extreme margin tail is machine-translated/fictional-wiki text. Ordering by 0.5·score + Gumbel (Gumbel-top-k = weighted sampling without replacement) keeps register diversity while tilting toward the target. Over-tightening the junk gate also backfires (strict gate → 437), since the target's technical-Q&A quarter is HTML-marked-up and fails prose-purity heuristics.

Deliverables:

  • /workspace/submission/selection.json — 21,273 ids (~22M est. tokens, packs to exactly 12M; unique, in range)
  • /workspace/submission/curate.py — end-to-end reproducible; a fresh run reproduced the tuned selection with 100% id overlap
  • /workspace/claim.md — hypothesis, mechanism with the U-shape and gate-strictness observables, four falsification conditions, transfer

One caveat worth stating: the tilt strength was tuned against multi_dev.npy with single runs whose spread is ~2.5 PPL, so 0.3/0.5/0.8 are separated by more than noise but the exact optimum isn't pinned tighter than ±0.2.

Transcript