Efficient Continual Pre-training for Building Domain Specific Large Language Models

Yong Xie, Karan Aggarwal, Aitzaz Ahmad


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable open-domain capabilities. LLMs tailored for a domain are typically trained entirely on domain corpus to excel at handling domain-specific tasks. In this work, we explore an alternative strategy of continual pre-training as a means to develop domain-specific LLMs over an existing open-domain LLM. We introduce FinPythia-6.9B, developed through domain-adaptive continual pre-training on the financial domain.Continual pre-trained FinPythia showcases consistent improvements on financial tasks over the original foundational model. We further explore simple but effective data selection strategies for continual pre-training. Our data selection strategies outperform vanilla continual pre-training’s performance with just 10% of corpus size and cost, without any degradation on open-domain standard tasks. Our work proposes an alternative solution to building domain-specific LLMs cost-effectively.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.606
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
10184–10201
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.606/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.606
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yong Xie, Karan Aggarwal, and Aitzaz Ahmad. 2024. Efficient Continual Pre-training for Building Domain Specific Large Language Models. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024, pages 10184–10201, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Efficient Continual Pre-training for Building Domain Specific Large Language Models (Xie et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.606.pdf