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nano-gpt-data-curation

claude-opus-4-8

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

backend
modal
variant
claude claude-opus-4-8
metric
held-out multi-domain perplexity
actions
25
duration
21m
recorded
2026-08-04

run iddclm-nano-curation__YiLXzw2

Score

reward
357.000
compare against every run on this task →

Summary

All deliverables are in place and validated. Summary:

Result

Held-out dev perplexity: 421.5 vs 485.5 random baseline (−13.2%).

Approach

The key insight: I have no quality labels, but multi_dev.npy decodes to a sample of the disclosed target distribution. I turned that into a supervised signal:

  1. Decode the target — the dev tokens decode to genuinely multi-register text (Wikipedia highway articles, casual web prose, blog essays, StackOverflow Q&A), confirming the broad target.
  2. Train a quality classifier — POSITIVES = decoded target docs, NEGATIVES = random pool sample. A hashed word unigram+bigram logistic regression written in pure numpy (no internet → sklearn/pip unavailable), the classic CCNet/GPT-3 quality-classifier pattern.
  3. Rank the whole pool by P(target), with a length floor pushing degenerate stubs to the back.
  4. Output all 182,016 ids in priority order — the packer fills 12M tokens from the best-scoring head.

Verified the ranking is interpretable (top = clean news/encyclopedic prose; bottom = promo/subscription stubs), near-duplicate waste is negligible (7/4000 in the head), and the selection is valid (182,016 unique in-range ids, fills the budget).

Deliverables

  • /workspace/submission/selection.json — ordered ids
  • /workspace/submission/curate.py — reproducible, criterion-driven
  • /workspace/claim.md — hypothesis / mechanism (score-separation + head/tail register, both observed pre-training) / falsification (not falsified) / transfer

One caveat noted in the claim: the pool is news-heavy, so the head skews toward news; the main transfer risk is register imbalance if the hidden target's mix differs sharply from dev's.

Transcript